


Aziraphael, the Last to Fall

by Mapes



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Armageddon, Bad Fashion Choices, Biblical References, Demon!Aziraphale, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fatal Flaws, Gardening, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Moths, Tea, Wing Grooming, angel!Crowley, bad moral choices, feeling the cold, good fashion choices, good moral choices, what if they were at all competent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-05-15 09:04:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19292575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mapes/pseuds/Mapes
Summary: It is commonly thought that when Lucifer and his followers were cast out of heaven, that this was rather the end of the whole thing, and everyone could get back to what they were supposed to be doing, such as praying, rejoicing in the glory of the Almighty, guarding trees, and so forth.But in actuality, although it doesn’t appear in the Bible, and has, by all accounts, been rather hushed up by all parties concerned, there was one more angel who fell from grace. Not for his part in the Great Rebellion (violence, on the whole, made him feel slightly queasy, and he’d managed to be somewhere else on the day itself), but for his flagrant disobedience in following one of Her earliest commands.In short, he gave away a sword.*****An AU Good Omens story where Aziraphale fell and Crowley did not.





	1. Chapter 1

It is commonly thought that when Lucifer and his followers were cast out of heaven, that this was rather the end of the whole thing, and everyone could get back to what they were supposed to be doing, such as praying, rejoicing in the glory of the Almighty, guarding trees, and so forth.

But in actuality, although it doesn’t appear in the Bible, and has been rather hushed up by all parties concerned, there was one more angel who fell from grace. Not for his part in the Great Rebellion (violence, on the whole, made him feel slightly queasy, and he’d managed to be somewhere else on the day itself), but for his flagrant disobedience in following one of Her earliest commands.

In short, he gave away a sword.

*******

Crowley was a fairly low-level angel, if such a status could be said to exist for the most holy of holies. He was nowhere near the front of the line when the good names were being handed out, all the -el ones, like Gabriel and Samael. True, the Light-bringer hadn’t had one of those either, he comforted himself with, but then - well, look how that had turned out.

He was just finishing up his work on one of the smaller nebulae - coaxing the newly-formed photons to spread out from each other to a more aesthetically pleasing wavelength - when the archangel Michael approached, her wings a thunderclap in the silence of infinity.

“Oh,” said Crowley, trying not to show just how much she’d scared the crap out of him. “Michael, didn’t see you there. Good day, is it?”

She folded her shining wings behind her and regarded him with a stony glare. “You haven’t heard?”

“Er. No.” He dipped a shoulder, gesturing at the nothingness around them. “Not much reaches me out here. That is, I might have heard it, if it was about helium. Was it about helium?”

“Crowley.”

He stuttered to a stop when he saw the gravity of her gaze. (It was very grave indeed. She had to bat away a couple of meteorites that were trying to orbit around her.)

“Another angel has fallen.”

“What?” He straightened up, dusted his palms against his robe, the stardust immediately disappearing from the pristine white. “Who? How?”

“Do you know the Principality Aziraphael?”

 _Guardian of something,_ Crowley thought, _a wall? A gate?_ There were dozens of angels that had been guarding all sorts of structures in Eden before the Fall of Man (and Woman). Walls, Gates, Doors; he had it on good authority that there had even been a particularly important Bench somewhere near the South Gate with an archangel marching up and down in front of it, and that was one of the cushy jobs. Most angels would give their right arm to be Guardian of the Great Southern Bench, Crowley thought wistfully.

But there was something, some memory attached to the name. A slight figure, white curls, generally at the back of any given group of angels. Hands perpetually fidgeting with his clothing. A permanently apologetic expression.

“Oh, I _do_ know him,” he said eventually, “I call him the Wandering Angel.” He waited for Michael to ask.

There was a long pause.

“Because he’s always asking you questions. You know, ‘I wonder this, I wonder that...’. ‘Just one more thing, Crowley, my dear’-”

“He gave his flaming sword to the First Man, and then tried to hide his crime from our Lord,” Michael snapped.

“Oh.” Crowley hadn’t been front and centre for the whole Fall business, either of angel or of man, and try as he might he couldn’t remember a great deal about Adam. Short man, he thought, didn’t say very much. Fewer ribs than you’d think. “Why’d he go and do a silly thing like that?”

Michael sighed. “It really doesn’t matter, Crowley. Who can fathom why anyone would go against the wishes of our Creator? It would be madness to even attempt to decipher the intentions of the fallen.”

“Right, yes. Still, though, did he really just give it away? Maybe he put it down somewhere and Adam, sort of, picked it up. ‘Oh, here’s a flaming sword, nobody will miss that, maybe I’ll-’”

“No. He gave it away, and when he was asked about it, he lied. To Her.”

Crowley made a face. “Yikes.”

“So, by order of the Archangel Gabriel, you are now the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. Report to the quartermaster to be issued your divine weapon, and-”

“Sorry,” Crowley interrupted, head spinning a little. Probably the lack of atmosphere. “I’m being _promoted?_ ”

Michael tipped her head back and forth, considering. “More of a lateral move, I’d say. Eden is empty, after all, but we still need to make sure that Man doesn’t try to sneak back in, steal some more apples. I don’t think they will, but you know Gabriel.” Michael turned, bracing herself against a sprinkling of carbon atoms for her take-off.

“Wait, er-” Crowley held out a hand, “what about all of this? The nebulae?”

She looked over her shoulder, eyes sweeping briefly over the work that had taken him the better part of two months. “Well, that shouldn’t take much longer, right? Once you add the hydrogen?”

“Shit!” He clapped a hand over his mouth immediately. “Gosh, sorry, that was - er - the bloody hydrogen though! I knew there was something.”

Michael was still standing half-turned, waiting to return to Heaven. She raised a single, perfect eyebrow.

Crowley managed a weak smile. “Yep, almost done. Be done in a couple of ticks. See you there.”

He braced himself slightly as she launched into space with a noise like a jet engine (or what a jet engine would be in several millennia). _Bloody he- heck,_ he thought to himself, _what would have possessed an angel to give his sword away? Catch me anywhere near humanity with a ten-foot barge pole._

*******

Later, Aziraphael remembered, it wasn’t the actual Falling that was the worst part. Oh yes, trembling beneath the Almighty’s holy light as the ground cracked and bled around him, as he felt the Grace at the very heart of himself shrivel and turn to ash, and plunged screaming into the abyss - at the time it had seemed like a pretty rough day. The needle-sharp winds streamed through him as he fell further than anyone would ever do again, struggling to right himself from his dizzying tailspin, tears freezing in the air behind him - not the best.

And it was no barrel of laughs once he’d arrived in Hell. Pandæmonium was already under construction. Thousands of demons were just starting to acclimatise to their newly fallen status, finally emerging from the cracks in the black rock where they’d hidden themselves in the weeks after the Fall, and beginning to create a place where they could, if not live, then perhaps survive. They were not exactly prepared for another twisted mess of feathers and sinew to tear through the sky (or through what, by committee, they had for now decided to call ‘the sky’), crash-landing in one of Hell’s many pits of boiling acid, and creating somewhat of a tidal wave across the preliminary foundations for Lucifer’s dark throne.

(Aziraphael often mused, after a couple of bottles of wine, that the Almighty wasn’t terribly up front on letting people know when they’d done a good job, but she certainly wasn’t subtle about the reverse.)

And yes, it had been a fairly tortuous couple of weeks once he’d dragged himself out of that whole thing. Physical pain, certainly, and the existential pain of losing one’s purpose, being torn away from the only love and security that one had ever known, etcetera. Several demons had eventually formed a posse and carried him away from the up-and-coming city, not in a particularly unkind way, but because they had all passed through their own screaming-and-pounding-at-the-earth stage of the grieving process, and now they rather needed to get some things done without that infernal racket day and night, pun almost certainly intended.

Later he heard that in those early days there was still some comradeship left over from Above, the feeling that if all demonkind worked together they could perhaps make something for all. But by the time Aziraphael’s wounds had healed, and he had pulled himself together enough to stumble through the wrought-iron gates of Pandæmonium, that feeling of brotherhood was rather behind them. Lucifer had changed his name to Satan, The Adversary, Father of Lies, and the whole place seemed to have rather a lot of what he’d come to think of as ‘office politics’. It turned out he wasn’t very good at that. In fact he fairly put his foot in it from the start.

“Because you _have_ to change it,” Beelzebub said with a sniff. “We all changed _our_ names. The Morningstar is no longer the Morningstar.”

Aziraphael waved a hand, hopefully in a subtle way, to gently bat away a fly that was getting dangerously close to his mouth. The look Beelzebub gave him indicated this had been less than successful.

“But it’s my name,” he said weakly. “I don't even _know_ how I'd choose another one.”

“Why don't we help you?” Pahaliah said from somewhere behind his left shoulder. That is, Aziraphael reminded himself, tutting - the demon who _used_ to be Pahaliah, the angel with dominion over virtue and morality. He'd scowled when Aziraphael had attempted to embrace him as such - Hastur, now.

Hastur strode out from behind him - the toad on his head slipping one of its front legs over his eye as it struggled to rebalance itself - and created a full-length looking glass with a snap of his fingers.

Aziraphael gasped. “But how, without the Grace of-”

Hastur scoffed. “Such parlour tricks are not reserved for Above alone. Our Lord Satan has already exceeded the Almighty’s paltry gifts of power, and unlike Her, he has shared them equally with his brothers and sisters.”

 _If the Morningstar were so powerful, funny he didn't use any of that during the Rebellion,_ thought a small part of Aziraphael, but he didn't voice it aloud. Instead the only outward sign he gave was a small reflexive flinch and a dart of his eyes upwards, still expecting a scalding ray of light to appear and punish their blasphemy.

Hastur grinned, releasing a puff of foul-smelling air. “This is _our_ place, brother.” He placed a hand on Aziraphael’s shoulder, and turned him roughly to face his own reflection. “And you must be one of us.”

Silly, really, thought Aziraphael faintly, to have walked through Pandæmonium seeing fallen comrades changed so completely that they were almost unrecognisable, but imagine oneself the same. One would think that the physical pain alone would have been clue enough.

He hadn’t had cause to look at his own reflection often Above. Vanity was a sin, after all, and for perfect beings such as angels, a sin dangerously within reach. Simply owning a mirror would have been enough to start tongues wagging. But Eden was a paradise, and as such contained many trilling little rivers and brooks, and more than one deep, silent rock pool, in which an angel who was passing by on his business might briefly catch a glimpse of himself. Not stop, not even pause, but perhaps slow his steps infinitesimally, just enough to get a suggestion of shining white curls, vivid blue eyes, a gentle smile. An air of divinity.

And even stood between Hastur (whose skin was more grey-green than the toad he carried atop his head) and Beelzebub (whose flies were constantly settling and disturbing each other from the many boils on her face) he felt the most changed.

His hair was the same colour, still white, but matted, glued to his forehead with sweat. The colour now reminded him less of ivory and silver, but of bones left to bleach in the sun. His skin was lined, the worry he had always felt inside now reflected in creases on his forehead, around his eyes, at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were no longer blue, but a dull, overcast grey, the bags under them heavy and dark. His skin had an oily sheen, sallow and slack. His once-pure robe he had thought simply burned, but now he saw it had transformed into an inky black, the edges fraying, his skin showing through here and there in - moth holes.

Sure enough, as he tipped his head to the left, he could see just under his right ear, a small tattoo of a moth. It felt as if the wings fluttered under his skin in Hell’s dim light. He realised, focusing on the small shapes flitting in front of him - not Beelzebub’s flies. Moths. Their soft wings brushed over his eyelashes.

His eyes darted back to the shadowed shape in the glass. He had worked tirelessly since the day of his creation, never ceasing, never resting, and had felt vital to the very end. But here, so far from Grace, he saw a man stooped by burdens too heavy to carry. Weary. Old.

“Plague?” said Hastur thoughtfully.

“ _Plague?_ Goodn- well, surely not,” Aziraphael managed, with dry, cracked lips.

“What about Ash? Or Bilious? Good name, Bilious.”

“It means ‘queasy’,” Aziraphael said with disbelief.

Hastur shrugged. “It’s your choice, little moth.”

Impossible, impossible to choose a name. Impossible to not be himself. _How can I be anything other than what I know I am?_

“No, I think I will keep my own name,” Aziraphael said finally. “But thank you for your concern.”

Beelzebub sighed. “So be it. We have a fairly long list of other things we should be dealing with-”

“It’s not a matter of what he _wants,_ ” Hastur spat, dark eyes flashing. “It’s a matter of what he _is_.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow?”

Hastur snapped his fingers and the mirror disappeared. “You can’t have a name that you can’t say.”

Aziraphael frowned. “What on earth do you mean? Why wouldn’t I be able to say Aziraph-”

The final syllables stuck in his throat as if they were a solid mass, a small piece of matter he was trying to expel, closing his airway and coming out as a strangled retching sound.

(The suffix “-el”, as any Biblical scholar will tell you, means “from God”. Gabriel, for example, means “God is my strength,” as Gabriel himself will tell you should you encounter him on the way to the Great Beyond. It makes sense that a creature of pure evil would no longer be able to use a name given by God - but then again, all names come from God, and indeed, all people, creatures, and everything that ever was or is or will be, and that doesn’t seem to have stopped the inhabitants of Hell from putting their sticky fingers all over those.)

But whether divine law or demonic superstition, Aziraphael was unable to say his name, until- “Aziraphale,” he choked out, finally. “Why wouldn’t I be able to say ‘Aziraphale’?”

Hastur rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on. You’re just changing the spelling?”

Aziraphale - his internal monologue already rewriting itself to assume the new name - stood up a little straighter, brushing the dust from his threadbare clothing, tugging down the sleeves that were more hole than cloth at this point. “Well. If that’s settled, shall I get on with some bricklaying, or something?”

Beelzebub waved a hand dismissively. “All done, that. No, it’s time to start going above ground and causing trouble.”

Aziraphale fretted. “Oh. What sort of trouble?”

“Satan’s orders. Get upstairs and start interfering with Man. Temptation, corruption, that sort of thing.” She grinned, showing a row of yellow teeth. “Show Herself that her new pets aren’t as perfect as she thinks. Anyone can Fall.”

“Right. Temptation. No problem.” Aziraphale managed a weak smile.

Hastur put an arm around his shoulders roughly and dragged him off to Stores to get a standard human vessel container. “Onwards and upwards.”


	2. Chapter 2

_Gomorrah, 2070 BC_

Most people - humans and angels - think that Hell is full of fire for torturing purposes. Get a whole bunch of fire together and half your torture’s pretty much done for you.

But if you were able to survey all of Hell’s denizens at once - say, conjure them individually to a very large conference room, two or three cities large, and somehow prevent them from murdering each other (or you), and you didn’t mind that this would put you at the very top of Satan’s Most Wanted list, given that you’d be dragging both him and his Dukes of Hell away from what they consider to be _extremely_ vital and time-sensitive business - well, if you were able to accomplish all this, and you surveyed them on their favourite torture devices (knowing full well that you’d be experiencing them all firsthand for the next millennia or so), fire wouldn’t even be in the top ten.

Needles would probably be first, as demons are a fairly traditional lot, and if sharp and pointy things have been doing the job for the last two thousand years, why start innovating now? Broken glass would be up there as well, and then maybe something more esoteric like that dream where you remember that you forgot to finish university, and now you’ll have to go back and do your final exams all over again, and you never did finish that book that you were supposed to read, oh, and all your clothes have disappeared - but the fire in Hell is not there for the souls of the damned.

It’s there for the comfort of the residents.

Demons, having been cast out from Heaven, are eternally damned to be cold, even standing in full sunlight in the middle of the desert. Hellfire is one of the only things that can warm a demon’s ice-cold blood.

And while other demons had made their peace with this, spending most of their time in the form of reptiles, or amphibians, or insects - one demon was coping by burying himself in as much fabric (real or miracled) as he could get his hands on. A loose, untidy turban piled on top of his head, a long, dark robe lined with animal fur, and a grey scarf tied around and around his face so that all one could see was a slim, sunburned nose.

It’s for this reason, perhaps, that Crowley did not immediately recognise the shape with its back pressed against a door in the former city of Gomorrah, one of the last intact doors in the city, in fact. Not many people would recognise this heap of dirty washing as a fallen angel.

The other reason would be that Crowley had his holy spear pressed against its neck, and the small squeaks of fear this produced were rather less than angelic. Or demonic, for that matter.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” the dirty washing said, slowly raising one of its arms with a hand out. “A demon, in Gomorrah? Well, isn’t that a coincidence!” The washing gave a small sort of laugh. “But, well, it really _is_ a coincidence. I had absolutely nothing to do with all of that...business.”

“Business,” Crowley choked out from between gritted teeth. He leaned slightly on the spear. “These animals surrounded the house where my brothers were staying, demanded them to come out to be - to be _violated_ , and you expect me to believe this was none of your doing?”

The demon shook his head hurriedly, the motion moving the scarf down and away from his face. Crowley saw chapped lips, a sudden flash of teeth.

“They’re not animals, they’re just human, doing the things that humans, sadly, often do.” The demon slowly raised his hand, pushed back the turban that was now more of a pile of cloth atop his head, and Crowley realised that they had met before.

“Aziraphael.”

The demon winced.

“Or is it something else, now? Arnamuun? Ba’al?”

“Just Aziraphale, just a little change, my dear,” Aziraphale said with a small shrug. He gently placed the palm of his hand on top of the spear pressing against his throat. “I don’t suppose-”

Crowley bared his teeth and Aziraphale quickly dropped his hand. “No, no, of course not.”

Two thousand years since the Fall and the world was more chaotic than ever. Demons roamed the earth, harming and killing whoever they wished, corrupting hundreds upon thousands of others. Crowley was not a member of the Powers, Her holiest of warriors, but in these dark times all were called to do battle with the evil plaguing the world. When they were told of what had happened in Gomorrah, he had been at the forefront with weapon and holy flame, to lay waste to the city.

And of course he would find a demon here - no doubt more than one, ten, a hundred. He looked at the pitiful creature before him, its sallow skin, its sunken eyes. “These people were acting under demonic instruction.”

“Oh, they really weren’t.”

“You’re saying that this was all, what, natural human behaviour? To try and drag my fellows from Lot’s home-” Crowley growled, his eyes flashing.

“Yes!” Aziraphale paused for a moment, “Well, not _natural_ , I wouldn’t say that necessarily, but, you know,” he waved a hand, “they rather do this, you see. A lot of this.”

“Evil.”

Aziraphale nodded as much as he could with a sharp piece of metal at his throat. “And good, too. They just sort of, do whatever they want, without very much input from _me_ , I have to say.”

“Then why are you here, if not to tempt them? And don’t lie. I’ll know if you lie.” Which was in itself a lie, but needs must and all that.

“Oh well, if you must know…” Aziraphale trailed off, and looked - of all things, the demon looked embarrassed. “I was at a tavern a few cities over having these marvellous little pastry things, I think they have some kind of goat’s cheese in them…”

Crowley cleared his throat.

Aziraphale blinked, shook his head. “Yes. Sorry. Well, I heard about this man here who does this incredible stuffed flatbreads, you see, and…” He trailed off, looking around at the destruction. “I suppose he _used_ to do them, rather.”

“You’re here for the food?”

Aziraphale shrugged, smiling faintly. “Guilty, as charged.”

Crowley studied him for a moment. Everything about the demon said weakness, suggested someone who wanted very much for people not to look at him if he could avoid it. Crowley had had fairly limited interactions with demons on Earth, but those he’d met (and vanquished) so far had either been violent, spitting with rage and clawing at his face, or charming, seductive, clawing in an entirely different fashion. This one just seemed... _dull._

He pulled his spear back, resting it at his side. He was tired, all of a sudden, the smiting and everything catching up to him. Truth be told it had all been a little bit of a blur towards the end, and it was only when a voice had said, “Crowley? Crowley, is that you?” that he’d come back to himself and seen this odd bundle of garments cowering against a door in front of him.

Aziraphale took a slow step away to the side, watching him as if afraid he would change his mind, and then stepped away from the house behind him, walking in a slow circle around Crowley.

“Don’t stand behind me,” Crowley snapped, turning on his heel to face the demon. “I may believe that you weren’t responsible for this, but I don’t _trust_ you.”

Aziraphale tucked his hands behind his back, nodding. “Probably a wise decision.”

There was a pause, broken only by the crackling of the fire and the distant screams, no doubt caused by his brothers and sisters elsewhere in the city.

Aziraphale cleared his throat softly.

“What.”

“Well….sorry, just, I was wondering…”

Crowley smirked slightly. _Still wandering._

“...um, was the _entire_ town responsible?”

Crowley frowned. “Yes. Obviously. What do you mean?”

The demon looked up and down the street, littered with rubble and bodies, and nudged a broken piece of pottery aside with the toe of his sandal. “Of course. All guilty.”

“It was a mob,” Crowley near spat. “And no one did anything to stop it, not the men, the women-”

“The children?” Aziraphale said innocently.

Crowley held up a finger with his free hand. “Do _not_ presume to judge _me_.”

“Of course not, my dear, how could I?” Aziraphale gave him a small, sad smile, and slowly turned his back, taking in the sights in the hills below them. The fires started by tipped candles, lanterns broken in the hurry to escape, were spreading across the city, and between the ash and the smoke everything around them was turning to grey. Gomorrah’s remains would be half-buried in the sand by dawn.

Ashes fell on Crowley’s eyelashes like snow, and he reached up a hand to brush them away, finding it sticky with blood. He miracled it away with a thought, tried to remember exactly when it had happened, and found that his memories were a haze of light and sound - screaming, and-

“This is what you do, isn’t it?” he said to Aziraphale’s turned back, blinking away the images from his head. “You tempt, and you twist!”

“Am I tempting, my dear? I’m dreadfully sorry. I honestly didn’t mean to.” Aziraphale’s hands were still behind his back, his fingers twisting the fabric into knots, small holes worn through to the lining beneath. “It just seems like an awful lot.”

“It’s divine retribution, demon. An instruction from God. It’s what’s necessary.”

Aziraphale looked at him sadly over his shoulder. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. What would I know, after all?”

“Exactly. Aziraphael the Doubting, that’s what they call you,” Crowley snarled, a spike of satisfaction when Aziraphale flinched at his former name. “A lesson to all the host of heaven on what happens when you start questioning the Almighty.”

Aziraphale looked shocked. “Gosh. I had no idea…” he trailed off. “Though I suppose there are worse legacies, Above.”

There was a gentle creak behind him, and he whirled about, spear at the ready.

“Don’t, please!” he heard Aziraphale cry out behind him.

In the doorway, in one of the last houses untouched by fire or lightning or - an angel - he could see that the door had opened a crack. Peering out was a girl of maybe eleven or twelve, her face shockingly clean against the soot-streaked walls next to her. A boy behind her, the family resemblance unmistakable.

Aziraphale appeared swiftly in his field of view, hands hovering in front of him, just in front of the spear. “Now, really, my dear, they’re just children, and they - they were asleep when the whole thing happened! How can someone who’s asleep be responsible for anything?”

Crowley shifted his weight to look at the children over Aziraphale’s shoulder, and the demon moved with him, his eyes that were just a moment ago looking anywhere but at him, now firmly holding his gaze. He shrugged, a nervous giggle.

Crowley swallowed. “It’s an order.”

“Ah, yes, but - from whom? Hmm?” Aziraphale cast his eyes upwards desperately. “Not from Herself directly, surely - Metatron? Or Gabriel? I mean that’s not the same thing as, as hearing it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.”

Crowley frowned. “The Creator is-”

“Not a horse, yes, I’m sorry, my dear, I quite forgot myself.” Aziraphale lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Just two children? Surely quite understandable that you missed two - and probably more, elsewhere, that others have missed - and, and you were distracted by,” here he put a broad hand on his own chest, black cinders under his fingernails, “an evil demon, with whom you did, um, brave and tremendous battle-”

“Why does a demon want to save children?” Crowley said slowly.

Aziraphale looked over his shoulder, and then back to the angel, biting his lip. “Isn’t it enough to want to thwart the divine plan of my counterpart?” He gestured at Crowley again, head to toe, white robes undisturbed by dirt, wings pure as snow leaving no trace though they dragged in the sand behind him.

Behind the demon he could hear stifled sobs, tiny broken gasps of air between fingers pressed over mouths, deafening in the silence around them.

“We’ll both be punished for this,” he said finally.

Aziraphale dropped his hands, letting out a breath he had been holding (completely unnecessarily, as neither angels nor demons actually need oxygen). “Well. Only if they find out, my dear.”

Later, when they’d escorted the children out to the edge of the city, found them a fast horse and sent them on their way to relatives in Zoar, Aziraphale didn’t thank him (he wasn’t sure he could face it, even after everything), but he did say softly, “I wonder if I might give you just a small word of advice, if you plan to spend much more time around humans?”

Crowley shrugged. “What more damage could it do, after everything?”

“It’s the eyes, you see,” Aziraphale gestured at them with a hand streaked with soot. “They don’t really have them down here. Could be putting them off.”

“I’ve seen plenty of people with eyes, demon, what _are_ you talking about?”

“Yes, sorry, I mean,” he conjured a small looking glass into existence and handed it to him. “The gold, my dear.”

Crowley looked at his reflection. His long red hair was miraculously free of ash, his skin was clear and with the slight glow that marked him as divine. His eyes, pure gold from edge to edge, glowed as two suns, a fire deep within in stark contrast to the night around them. He’d been told by other angels that the intensity of the light changed with his mood - no doubt, during the destru- the _cleansing_ of Gomorrah, they’d been fairly intimidating.

“They do wonderful things with smoked glass, these days, and these little pieces of metal you can hang over your ears,” Aziraphale mused next to him. “Really, what will humans think of next?”

*******

_Lindisfarne, 793 AD_

The good thing about jumpers, thought Aziraphale, was that you could layer up as many as you wanted, and as long as you didn’t go too far and start resembling a turnip, people really wouldn’t give you as much grief as they had over, say, the whole turban business. Everybody looked untidy and rumpled in a jumper, that was rather the point.

The bad thing about jumpers was that if you got them wet - if, for example, you’d hopped out of a Viking longship and tripped over an inconspicuous rock, then they turned into a giant sponge and sucked up as much frigid water as possible, and really the only way to get dry was to take everything off and miracle the water out of them one by one. (He’d tried doing it while he was wearing them and didn’t seem to be able to get rid of the chill.)

The people he’d sailed over with, Orrin and Gudfinna and the rest, were really very sweet, helping him up over the rest of the rocks and into the monastery - there seemed to be some kerfuffle at that point, but his hood had fallen over his eyes and the chill in his bones made it hard to think - and had found him a nice little cloister with a roaring fireplace and left him to it. They’d promised that they would come back and fetch him in a bit to go and have a look around the library, and generally been very companionable about the whole thing.

He had his last jumper over his head, his hose thankfully still on, when Crowley slipped in quietly through the door. (Of course, it shouldn’t have mattered, as angels never Fell and so being naked was as natural to them as any other state of being, and as a demon he was supposed to use every skill at his disposal for the corruption of Man, including getting naked from time to time - and yet Aziraphale had found that it _did_ matter, a bit, and so was glad he hadn’t been caught out.)

“You brought Vikings _here_?” Crowley hissed, pressing his back against the door as if it could keep them out.

Aziraphale, who still had the very literal (and damp) wool over his eyes, yelped and fell over.

After the angel had helped him up, dusted him off, and passed him a very scratchy blanket to wrap himself in, he said, “What on earth are you doing here, demon?”

“Oh, it’s Aziraphale-”

“I know who you are!” Crowley rubbed his eyes under his sunglasses, something Aziraphale felt a glow of pleasure at seeing. He seemed to have swapped his angelic robes for something that blended in rather better - white linen hose under a soft grey tunic, a leather knapsack over one shoulder. But his red hair-

“Oh, _Crowley_ ,” said Aziraphale with genuine sorrow. “You know that won’t grow back.”

Crowley ran a hand over the bald circle in the centre of his head, rubbed smooth with pumice. “It’s called a tonsure, demon, it’s a monk thing. I’m blending in!”

Aziraphale winced. “Still, there are limits, surely. And for a member of the heavenly host, you look so _drab_. Couldn’t you have found something more...impressive?”

Crowley’s fingers twitched as if he was resisting the urge to tug at his (very plain) tunic. “I don’t care about any of this earthly rubbish! I’m only down here for a couple of centuries to clean up _your_ messes. And speaking of messes,” Crowley strode to the tiny slit of a window and gestured out at the Viking ships drawn up onto the beach. “Why did you bring them to a monastery? Or do I even need to ask?”

Aziraphale took a seat on a low bench next to the fire. “Oh, I ran into them in Iceland.” He smiled. “Marvellous place, Iceland, have you ever been?”

Crowley glared at him, stony faced.

Aziraphale looked back at his knees, shoulders slumping. “Well, it’s really quite lovely - little heavy on the salt, here and there, and some odd ideas about how long one should keep a shark hanging around before eating it, but-”

“Aziraphale.”

“Yes, sorry. Anyway, I mentioned to them that I was heading to England, and that there were one or two libraries that I wanted to take a look at, and they said, oh, Lindisfarne, that sounds lovely this time of year, why didn’t they just…” Sounds of breaking glass began to filter in through the closed door, along with some rather more unpleasant sounds, suggestive of a number of monks who had not been prepared for a large party of Icelanders turning up at their front door. “Um, drop by,” Aziraphale finished weakly.

“Drop by?” Crowley pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead and regarded Aziraphale with his level, golden gaze. Banked fires seemed to glow dimly from within.

Aziraphale shrank slightly. “Well, now I see that they probably didn’t mean for the hospitality. It didn’t really occur to me at the time.”

“You brought a marauding warband to one of the biggest monasteries in England, and it didn’t occur to you that they'd sack the place?

Aziraphale began pulling his clothes into his lap and miracling the water out of them, passing his hands over them in wide stripes, checking the collars and cuffs and so forth. “They’re really quite lovely people when you get to know them,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“Oh yes, I’m sure. I’ll be sure to introduce them to the abbot, if they haven’t thrown him out a window already!”

There was a distant splash that may or may not have been the abbot. “Well, what are _you_ doing here, anyway?”

Crowley pushed his sunglasses back on his nose. “This is a house of God. I don’t need a reason to be here.”

“Well, _actually_ the only consecrated ground is in the chapel down by the beach,” Aziraphale said mildly. “Otherwise, of course, I’d be hopping up and down with the soles of my feet on fire. Still, I’d be warm, I suppose.” He put a finger to his lips, eyes distant. “I wonder if it would dry my clothes too?”

Crowley, sensing yet another conversational tangent that would go on for quite a while if he didn’t step in, stepped in. “If you must know, I came to deliver a piece of the True Cross.”

“Oh?” Aziraphale perked up, then remembered the circumstances of the cross itself and how that might have been a particularly painful memory for the angel. “Oh,” he said, trying to look suitably sympathetic. “Yes, I was sorry to hear about that.”

Crowley opened his mouth - probably to say something cutting - and then thought better of it.

“I was nowhere near Jerusalem at the time, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Aziraphale said quickly, starting to pull his jumpers on under the blanket and getting in a bit of a muddle. “I was in China, of all places - they had a new type of soup there, at the time, with a whole bird’s nest in it, and - well, I thought it was one of those names, you know, where it’s called that but the ‘nest’ is made out of pastry, or bread, or something - but _actually-_ ”

As he was fastening his chaperon around his shoulders there was a knock at the door.

Crowley froze, pulling the knapsack to his chest.

“Ah. That’ll be Gudfinna, I should think. One moment.” Aziraphale moved to the door and opened it a crack.

For all the sounds of chaos outside, Gudfinna looked as calm and at ease as she had been on the swaying longship. She stood at least half a head taller than him, her red braids brushing the fur draped over her shoulders, the other side of her head shaved. Her biceps flexed as she rested a hand on the hammer at her belt, runes carved on one side to grant it the blessings of Thor.

“Good friend!” she said with a lilting accent, grinning. “How is your funny English wool? Are you ready to fetch your books?”

“Oh, yes, thank you _so_ much, I’m all dried off now.” Aziraphale held out an arm as evidence and Gudfinna rubbed the material between two strong fingers.

“Incredible stuff, this English wool. Orrin thought for sure you would be shivering in here for the rest of the night like a little mouse!” She slapped him on the back and he struggled not to wince.

“Yes, well, one of those things I suppose - um, look, Gudfinna, I don’t suppose,” he cleared his throat, “there’s nothing, um, violent going on out there, is there?”

“Ah,” Gudfinna looked genuinely crestfallen, “it’s true that when we took a lot of their gold and jewels that they got very upset, and we had to throw some of them in the sea.”

“In the sea!” Crowley couldn’t help from shouting.

Gudfinna narrowed her eyes, and pushed open the door slowly with one palm, slipping her hammer out of her belt with the other. She took in Crowley’s humble clothes, his knapsack, and worst of all, his tonsure. “Should this monk go into the sea as well, English?”

“Oh, now, really,” Aziraphale stepped in front of Crowley, hands up, “this is a, well, a friend of mine-”

“We’re _not_ friends.”

“-well, an acquaintance, really - um, that’s an English word that means, well, _sort_ _of_ friend, and he’s - we’re just going to go upstairs and take a look at the library, and then we’ll be out of your hair.” He laughed nervously, and turned to Crowley, giving him what he hoped was a significant look.

For a moment he thought Crowley might refuse, that it might be Gomorrah all over again, the holy spear and divine retribution - but eventually he sighed, and stepped forward towards the door.

Gudfinna held up a hand to stop him. “One moment, English. Does your friend have any gold or jewels in his little bag?” She turned it palm up and gestured for him to hand it over.

Aziraphale pretended to think about it. “Oh no, they’re all - he’s taken a vow of poverty, so it’s-”

Gudfinna took the bag and reached inside. Aziraphale put out an arm to stop Crowley from launching himself at her, but found that he didn’t need to - the angel was just standing there, watching, his expression unreadable.

She pulled out a gold cross about a handspan long. The metal had been polished to a sheen, casting reflections over her hungry eyes in the firelight. She tossed it into the air lightly, end to end, turning it over. He could see that, thankfully, it wasn’t solid gold - rather a hollow frame for the length of wood inside. A reliquary.

Gudfinna made eye contact with Aziraphale. “Is England so rich that a man with gold is poor, friend?” He noticed she’d dropped the ‘good’ from that now.

Crowley was still standing there motionless, giving no sign on whether he was about to flee or fight.

It was always so difficult to know what was the right thing, that was to say, the _wrong_ thing to do in these situations, but surely one could never go wrong with deceiving someone, Aziraphale thought desperately. Wasn't that front and centre in the job description?

Aziraphale snapped his fingers quickly behind his back. “Oh really, my dear, I would think you’d know paint when you saw it. Look, you can see here, it just peels off.” He scratched at the very-definitely-gold with a fingernail and hoped the hasty miracle would hold up to scrutiny.

Gudfinna tipped her head back and forth, considering. “If he loves poverty so much, why does he paint his sticks gold?” She jabbed in Crowley’s direction with the cross.

“Even monks need to keep up appearances,” Crowley said behind him, making him jump.

Gudfinna made a little humming noise, tossing the piece of the True Cross from hand to hand. “Very well. Keep your stick.” She threw the bag and the cross to Aziraphale, who by the grace of G- Sa- someone, managed to catch them without dropping them.

She wagged a finger at him. ”But no sneaking little gems into your bag on the way, English! You remember, everything in a pile and we split it up fairly at the end.” She turned and strode away down the corridor, her footsteps echoing in the darkness.

Crowley looked at him over the top of his sunglasses.

Aziraphale looked a tiny bit shamefaced, dispelling the miracle with one hand, the scratches on the cross melting away. “Well, I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble, just because I inadvertently-”

“Caused the sacking of Lindisfarne,” Crowley drawled. He wrapped the cross back up in his bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Sounds like you’ll get a nice little bonus out of it as well, hmm?”

“Oh _really_ ,” Aziraphale spluttered, “I _told_ them I didn’t want anything, but they were awfully insistent, and in the end I only gave in to avoid an argument. I mean, what would a demon want with gems?”

“What would a demon want with a book?” Crowley brushed past him and headed, not to the library, but to where a rowboat pulled up on the opposite shore of the island would bear them both, eventually, back to the mainland.


	3. Chapter 3

_London, 1601 AD_

Honestly, thought Crowley, the worst thing about Elizabethan fashion wasn’t just that it was uncomfortable and hot, or that it made everyone look like an overstuffed eiderdown had been attacked by a cheese grater - it wasn’t even all the dam- all the blessed feathers on hats that would inevitably get in your face when you were behind someone in a queue. It was, without a doubt, the ruffs. Why humanity had decided that a 360-degree goiter was the height of haute couture, he would never understand. It was a tool of the devil, no matter what Aziraphale said. 

Still, you had to blend in, didn’t you? Rumour was that the quartermaster was getting more and more stingy with new human vessels as the millennia went by; the number of angels living on earth having dropped to under a thousand or so.  

Any angel discorporated these days had to complete a seventeen page report in triplicate (“Prithee resolve th’events occurring ere thine earthly vessel was destroy’d, and how thou wouldst avoid this happenstance again”). After the report had been thoroughly examined for mistakes (both grammatical and ontological), your case would then be heard by a panel of seraphim who hadn’t been on Earth since before Christ was risen, and as such had a spotty understanding at best of concepts such as, “I was run down by a horse-drawn carriage” ( _recorporation request denied: horses are unable to hold sketching implements and there is no evidence to suggest artistic works pose a danger to celestial beings_ ), or, “I was thrown overboard after being struck by a cannonball” ( _recorporation request denied: though the Biblical canon is by its very nature powerful, as it contains the words and deeds of our Creator, this committee is unable to understand why its being formed into a sphere would cause harm, nor what relation this has to boards_ ). Much easier to just wear sunglasses and grow a dapper little moustache to escape notice.

Crowley smoothed a hand over his doublet, the popinjay blue lining of his sleeves showing through the slits in the velvet, as he searched for his purse. Bending to check his pockets, he almost tripped up someone behind him with the point of his rapier - a young apprentice hurrying to catch the second half of the performance before the interval music finished.

Crowley finally just miracled a twopenny coin into existence and exchanged it for a horsehair cushion and a seat in the upper gallery. He rested his sword against the bench and settled in behind Aziraphale, as they’d done dozens of times before. The demon, as agreed, gave no sign that he’d noticed his arrival - or in fact that they’d met before, ever - giving Crowley time to loosen his ruff and fan himself with the brim of his comically large hat.

Aziraphale was slumming it as per usual, a dark knit cap pulled down over his untidy curls, soot-black woolen jerkin stuffed to bursting with straw, or newspaper, or whatever his new scheme was this time for staying warm at the height of summer. Leaning to one side Crowley could see he was clutching his playbill in his hands, the paper screwed up in his pallid fists.

He seemed to be quite worked up about something. _Perhaps it’s a bad one,_ Crowley mused, directing his attention to the stage where Burbage was striding up and down across the boards. Remarkably, he seemed sober, and didn’t even need the assistance of the prompter in the wings. Still, there were scant few people in the audience - the gallery empty but for the two of them.

Crowley tuned in to the speech - the seats at the back of the theatre, though more comfortable, were not terribly good for acoustics. It seemed to be some rot about being, or not being; there were some slings and arrows in there as well but not the interesting kind. In short it was one of the gloomy ones, not like the one they’d seen a few years earlier, which had plenty of mistaken identities, secret letters, people eavesdropping, and so forth. For an angel so intimately acquainted with the Great Plan, it tickled him in a particular and highly personal way. Crowley had actually stayed with Aziraphale for the whole play that time, transfixed by the uncomfortably familiar back-and-forth between Benedick and Beatrice.

As Burbage carried on about sleeping and dreaming (and Crowley thought he heard something about rubbing, but it didn’t seem to be a comedy so he must have imagined it), he let his mind wander, eyes passing over the crowd in a cautious way, just in case there were any familiar faces. There was no point trying to talk to Aziraphale before the interval anyway.

Suddenly Aziraphale let out a small choked sound, his shoulders hitching just once.

Crowley’s eyes darted from him to the stage. He didn’t recognise the actor, but he seemed to be playing a king of some variety. He was kneeling in the centre of the boards, nothing but a blood-red curtain behind him, his eyes cast up to the sky, his hands clasped together.

“Try what repentance can,” he cried in a piteous tone. “What can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent?” He went on to call for help from angels, which Crowley thought was fairly rich for a man who had apparently murdered his brother to marry his sister-in-law. 

As the scene continued, Aziraphale seemed to shrink a little, his hand swiping up and around his eyes hastily as he muttered something to himself in a dark tone.

For a moment Crowley thought about getting to his feet, picking up his things and heading out into the noonday sun, if for no other reason than to give the demon his dignity. Then Aziraphale took a handful of his moth-eaten sleeve and gripped it fiercely, giving himself a sharp pinch to his forearm and shaking his head.

Crowley miracled up a handkerchief and leaned forward to hold it over the demon’s shoulder.

Aziraphale went very stiff and still. He started to turn to look over his shoulder at Crowley, then thought better of it, took hold of the handkerchief (which immediately started to yellow and fray under his fingertips) and blew his nose loudly.

“Allergies,” he said hoarsely, rubbing at his eyes with the back of one of his sleeves.

“If you say so,” Crowley said in a careful tone. He stood up and took a small step over the bench, settling next to Aziraphale. “Seems odd, a demon in tears. Seems like something your lot shouldn’t be able to do.”

Aziraphale shot him an unreadable glance. “And why’s that?”

Crowley shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I suppose sadness doesn’t seem like an emotion a demon would have much use for.”

“Well, that’s where you’re entirely wrong.” Aziraphale said tensely. “You don’t suppose the first day in Hell was all cake and champagne, do you?”

Crowley looked at him out of the corner of his eye. Aziraphale was fiddling with the playbill in his lap, handkerchief now discorporated out of existence. One of those ever-present grey scarves around his neck hid the bottom of his face from view, but he could see that the demon’s eyes were more red than usual. He always looked weary, but suddenly he looked - well, depressed. 

“I forgot you were coming,” Aziraphale muttered, almost to himself. “We’re already in act three.”

“I got caught up.”

Aziraphale’s brow furrowed. “Oh, a blessing? I thought they’d rather cut down on that sort of thing.”

Crowley mused for a moment, unsure of how much to share. “No, well...if you must know, I was taking a nap.”

Aziraphale looked at him fully, face lit up. “Napping!”

Crowley groaned. “Please don’t crow. I know, I know, you tried to tell me-”

“How was it? Tell me _everything._ ”

The problem was that living on Earth for a long period of time rather required a human body. Yes, one could appear in a shower of gold or a ray of sunlight, pop into someone’s dream or terrify a shepherd half to death, but to do the day-in, day-out of it all, you had to check a human vessel out of Stores, and live in it _all the time._  

Form shapes nature. Aziraphale was proof of that, with his endless eating, and napping, and quite often drinking too, these days - and almost in easy opposition to him, Crowley had resisted it for far, far longer. Angels do not require food or rest, and so theoretically neither should his human vessel on earth. But there was something about temptation that the others Above had never really understood, which was that it wasn’t like a bolt of lightning, it wasn’t like a demon taking you by the arm and leading you into a brothel - it was more like a little voice, every day, that just said, _yes, but what if we...?_

It’s something Aziraphale had turned out to be incredibly good at, just being in the right place, at the right time, with a soft little question like, _I wonder why She didn’t put the Tree of Knowledge somewhere a little further from the Garden?_ or _I agree it was a good thing that the Son of God exorcised the evil spirit, but it doesn’t seem terribly fair for all those pigs,_ or _Crowley, my dear, honestly, a little lie down would do you the world of good, you really do work too hard, you know._

And between Aziraphale (who despite being an evil demon was almost tolerable once you got to know him) and the little voice in his human body saying things like _Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a cup of tea and a nice sit down?_ , he’d found himself indulging in more and more human pleasures that, perhaps, weren’t exactly essential. Sometimes he wondered if Falling from Grace was more of a series of stepping stones, little decisions that looked perfectly reasonable at the time, but then you traced your path back and found yourself in Hell.

He came back to earth (so to speak) with a start. Aziraphale had flagged down a hazelnut seller and purchased a bag. He shook it in Crowley’s direction. “Don’t they smell heavenly?”

Crowley simply raised an eyebrow. “I don’t get hungry.”

Aziraphale patted him on the upper arm briefly, hand sinking into the many layers of silk and velvet. “Of course not, my dear. But there’s nothing better after a nap than a spot of lunch.” He nodded towards the stage. “Here comes Hamlet to speak to his mother, look, and - well, I won’t spoil it for you, but you might want to keep an eye on that curtain at the back…” 

Crowley crunched a nut between his teeth with a resigned expression, and settled in.

*******

 _London, 1895 AD_  

The Albermarle Club was well-regarded in London for a number of reasons. It was one of the most progressive, being not only a gentlemen’s club, but a gentlewomen’s club as well. The great playwright Oscar Wilde was a member, often seen taking supper in the well-appointed dining room. 

But for Aziraphale the main draw was the plush sitting room. It was generally filled with elderly men who were prone to feeling the chill, and so the fire was always well-banked and the air thick with tobacco smoke. With a little demonic luck he could get an armchair to pull up next to the fire, and the staff had long since given up asking him not to scorch the fabric. It wasn’t the full bodily warmth of hellfire, but it was as close as one could get on Earth.

There was one other thing that the Albermarle was known for, in the right circles, and it did have a little to do with Oscar Wilde: discretion. For the young man or woman of London who wanted to meet someone and not have it remarked upon in the wrong circles, the Albermarle had a number of small private rooms for dining - and if the recent fashion of litigating against consenting relationships between adults meant that an angel and a demon could get a nice piece of mutton and a mug of hot chocolate in private, well, every cloud has a silver lining.

Crowley was late, again, and tardiness didn’t seem like a good habit for an angel, but Aziraphale bore it with good cheer. It was almost Christmas, after all, with all of his favourite things - good food, buckets of wine, well-stocked coal sheds from which people surely wouldn’t mind if he borrowed a shovel or two, and of course, plenty and plenty of bad feeling and frayed tempers and general ill-will to one’s fellow man. Usually Aziraphale could take the whole of the season off from November to February. 

Not that he was getting too many missives from Below these days - a couple of big temptations over the years, and of course he was still sending through his regular reports, but there could be weeks, months even, between instructions. In the meantime he was free to do as he liked as long as he could attribute some ongoing mischief to his actions.

Eventually Crowley arrived, approaching through the smoke-wreathed air with his usual level of tact and dignity, which is to say he waved his hat around to clear a path and grumbled, “I don’t know how you can stand it in here, ‘Zira, really I don’t. The stink is appalling.”

Aziraphale couldn’t help but notice the raised eyebrows and audible sounds of displeasure from the occupants of other overstuffed armchairs, and got to his feet quickly, taking his friend by the elbow and guiding him gently towards the dining room. “I rather like it that way, my dear, you know that.” 

Crowley scowled. “Goodness knows what it’s doing to your insides. When was the last time you had your lungs overhauled?” He tugged at his collar irritably, continuing to gripe as Aziraphale miracled a small change to the reservations list so that they weren’t forty-five minutes late.

The waiter led them to one of the small rooms at the back, Crowley overtaking him to tug the door open with rather more force than was necessary. It was their usual room to dine in whenever they had the opportunity, partly for the quiet and the secrecy, of course, but also because this room had a small stove in the corner.

Aziraphale had barely closed the door behind them before Crowley was shedding his clothes - jacket, waistcoat, unbuttoning his shirt to the waist to reveal a vest beneath. He let out a sigh and slumped in one of the comfortable chairs. “And another thing, why do we have to have it so infer- so incredibly hot in here?”

“You know why, my dear,” Aziraphale said amiably, pouring them both a cup of coffee.

Crowley glared at him a moment from behind his sunglasses, before deflating a little, pushing them up onto his forehead to rub his eyes with finger and thumb. “Yes, yes, I know. Doesn’t agree with all this ridiculous clothing, though.”

“I rather like it,” Aziraphale said, running his index finger over the velvet lapel of his suit jacket. “And I think it rather suits you.”

“Four layers!” Crowley said, leaving his sunglasses on his head. His eyes were barely glowing at all today; a candle seen underwater. “ _Five_ layers, if you’re outside. And a hat.” He gestured at Aziraphale’s jacket. “And I really don’t think you should be wearing velvet at your age, ‘Zira.”

“Five thousand, eight hundred and ninety one?”

“You know what I mean. And don’t get me started on the beard.”

Aziraphale put a hand over his full, thick beard defensively. “I thought you said you liked it.”

Crowley waved a hand. “I did. It’s fine, it’s alright. It’s just - a symptom of the whole thing.” He pointed a long finger at him. “You’re getting middle-aged.”

“Well, if I am, so are you, my dear,” said Aziraphale, motioning briefly at Crowley’s sunglasses as he heard the waiter returning with their lunch. It was one thing to be dining with a man in his smallclothes, quite another to be dining with a man whose eyes were made of gold. He didn’t want to get a reputation.

There was silence while they made their way through a fairly excellent piece of beef and some lovely roasted potatoes. (The food had actually been quite dreadful the previous year, but as luck would have it, the chef at the Carlton Club suddenly felt like a change, and the former chef at the Albermarle decided to pack it all in and move to Australia. This was definitely good fortune and had nothing whatsoever to do with Aziraphale turning up at both their lodgings in the middle of the night.) The wine pairing had started off fairly uninspired, but had been surprised to find itself changed from a middling Bordeaux to a top-range Champagne partway through the first course, and the conversation seemed to flow more easily from there.

“Do you mind if I ask what has you in such a poor temper, my dear?” Aziraphale said through a mouthful of potato.

“Oh, it’s this gardening business,” Crowley sighed, dropping his fork on his plate. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time, but none of these people actually care about the health of their plants. They just want everything to look,” he gestured with his champagne flute, “ _pretty_.” The way Crowley said “pretty” made it sound like something you might find stuck to the sole of your shoe. 

“And is it such a crime to want to look things to look nice?” Aziraphale asked mildly.

Crowley looked him up and down. “Ask Wilde, you’re wearing his jacket.”

“And you have his hair, angel,” Aziraphale said with a smirk.

Crowley ran a hand through his chin-length hair defensively. It was a longstanding argument since the evening they met Oscar Wilde after a performance of _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Coincidentally Crowley had had his hair cut the day before. Mr Wilde was terribly complimentary about it, and Aziraphale had pointed out that it wasn’t _too_ dissimilar to Mr Wilde’s _own_ hairstyle, and then Crowley had said that he’d never even seen Mr Wilde before that evening, and would have had no idea what kind of hair he had. Ultimately everybody had left on bad terms and in a furious mood, except of course Aziraphale who had rather enjoyed himself and thought the play was very funny. Since then Crowley naturally couldn’t change his hairstyle, because that would be a tacit acknowledgement that he’d modelled it on Oscar Wilde in the first place, rather than just a hairstyle he’d happened to like.

It was one of those arguments that exist the world over in relationships longer than a few years, that come up every so often and are never really resolved to anybody’s satisfaction, but strangely often bring two people closer together. Plus, Mr Wilde was now a member of the Albermarle, so Aziraphale got to see the two of them glower at each other fairly frequently. If the fireplace in the sitting room was the next best thing to hellfire, the warm feeling in his chest when Crowley said, “oh, blast it all, it’s _him_ again” was a close contender.

“They all want their houses to look like some charming little villa they saw on the continent, and no amount of explanation will get them to realise that Italy and England have two very different climates,” Crowley grumbled, pouring them both another glass of champagne from a bottle that still seemed to be full.

“Can’t you just,” Aziraphale made a little flower-opening motion with his fingers and said, “whoosh?”

Crowley gave him a look. “No, I can’t just ‘whoosh’, ‘Zira.”

“Why not?” 

“Well...I shouldn’t _have_ to! It’s plants, it’s - rules, you plant them right and they grow, you shouldn’t need to use miracles. If people would just stick to the rules-”

“Then we’d all still be in Eden, and I’d have a flaming sword to keep me warm,” Aziraphale said, not unkindly, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

Crowley deflated a little. “Yes. Well. I know it’s not the worst thing in the world, it’s just...irritating, that’s all.”

There was a distant sound of shouting somewhere outside, perhaps in the dining room. Aziraphale got up to take a peek through the door. There was a brutish-looking man with mutton chops and a fairly unimpressive hat yelling at someone in the lobby.

“What is it?” murmured Crowley, his head pressed close to Aziraphale’s to peer through the gap, rebuttoning his shirt.

“He wants to see Wilde,” Aziraphale said, struggling to eavesdrop. “Something about his son, Bosie.”

“Oh, G- oh bugger,” said Crowley flatly. “That’s Wilde’s new flavour of the month. Completely smitten.” He shrugged on his jacket, leaving his waistcoat on his chair, and opened the door. “This’ll be trouble.” 

Aziraphale followed him out to the spacious lobby, where the man (“John Douglas, ninth Master of bloody Queensberry!”) was yelling at the doorman. He’d gone quite purple in the face.  

“Oscar Wilde, I demand to see Oscar Wilde! I know he’s here, probably with that son of mine!”

“Everything alright, Harry?” Crowley said to the elderly doorman behind the lectern. He was holding the members’ book protectively to his chest - Aziraphale assumed the Master of Bloody Queensberry wasn’t listed.

“Yes, sir, sorry to disturb you, sir, gentleman wants to see Mr Wilde, sir. Only I told him he’s not in, and-”

“And it’s a fucking lie!” boomed Lord Douglas.

Crowley held up a hand placatingly. “Now, hold on, your lordship, poor old Harry here can’t very well bring you someone who’s not in the building, can he?”

Lord Douglas looked like he was about to bite Crowley’s fingers off. “Then I demand to search the premises to make sure that he’s _not_ here!”

“Wellll,” Crowley drawled, “that’s not going to happen either. You see only members are admitted, you’re not a member,” he pointed at the ledger, “cut and dried, really.”

Lord Douglas looked from Crowley, his collar stud unbuttoned, his hands in his pockets, to Aziraphale, who although impeccably dressed, always gave off rather a sheen of disrepute, whether from his constantly unkempt hair or the dark circles around his eyes.

“So you’re _all_ sodomites, eh?” he said finally.

Crowley burst out laughing. “My goodness, you _are_ delightful.” 

Aziraphale felt trouble brewing in the air like static electricity. He could tell by the sharp corners of Crowley’s grin that he was about to do something they’d both regret. “Crowley, perhaps we should go back to-” 

“Crowley, is it? Perhaps I should bring the police here, Mr Crowley, and have them arrest the whole bloody lot of you!”

Crowley rocked back on his heels slightly, making a tutting sound with his tongue against his teeth. “What do you think, Zira? Do _you_ fancy him?”

Aziraphale’s eyes bulged. “Sorry, um-”

“I mean, he’s a bit old and hate-filled for me, but what do you think? Shall we admit him to our little sodomy club?” Crowley started to whistle an odd tune that Aziraphale eventually realised was ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’.

Lord Douglas was turning an interesting shade of scarlet. “Right! That’s it!” He pulled out a calling card, snatched the doorman’s pen, and scribbled something furiously, tossing it in his face. “Tell Wilde I’ll be back for him later! And as for you,” he waved a finger in Crowley’s face, which really was about as dangerous as it got without covering yourself in gravy and climbing into the lion pen at the Zoological Society, “don’t think you’re going to get away with this! I’ll be back here with the police, with the clergy, with the whole damn press to shut down your little club! Sodomites!” He spun on his heel and yanked the door open, heading out into the cold. 

“Alright, darling, but not Thursday - I’m busy Thursday!” Crowley yelled after him.

Aziraphale had just enough presence of mind to wipe the man’s mind of, if not everything that had happened in the last five minutes, then the exact faces and names of the angel and demon who’d been responsible for a large part of it.

Crowley turned back to him, hands still in his pockets. He wrinkled his nose at the demonic influence. “Oh, you didn’t have to go and do that. What can _he_ do?”

The doorman picked up the calling card from the thick carpet. “To...Oscar Wilde...posing as...oh dear,” he read out loud, tracing the words with a trembling finger.

Aziraphale peered over his shoulder. “Sodomite,” he said with a sharp look at Crowley. 

“‘Somdomite,’ actually,” Crowley said, pointing out the extra ‘m’.

“Mr Wilde won’t be happy,” the doorman said, running a hand over his pale features.

Aziraphale helped him to sit down behind the desk. “That’s alright, Harry, we’ll let him know it wasn’t your fault. Don’t you worry.”

Crowley was still whistling happily when they sat back down to finish their desserts.

“Got all the frustration out of your system, I suppose?” said Aziraphale tightly, his brows knitted.

“Oh, come on. He was a brutish, horrible bigot. Standing up to him was the most angelic thing I could have done,” Crowley said, leaning back in his chair. 

Aziraphale popped a spoonful of cream into his mouth. “I wouldn’t have thought angels would have much use for rage.”

Crowley snorted, flipping a silver spoon between his fingers. He did a double take. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“What happened to turning the other cheek?”

“That’s for _humans,_ not angels.” Crowley scowled, running his hand through his hair and pulling a handful by the roots. “Righteous anger is most definitely an angelic emotion.”

“It’s not wrath?”

Crowley opened his mouth, stormclouds gathering in his eyes, and then slowly closed it again. He sank into his chair a little, his eyebrows descending lower and lower.

Aziraphale took the time to thoroughly enjoy and finish his dessert.

“It’s funny that that’s what they took from the city. From Sodom,” Crowley said finally. “I don’t know why that’s the part that stuck.”

Aziraphale put his spoon down. “Isn’t it why you destroyed the city?”

Crowley made an airy gesture with one hand. “It’s not - not because they were men, it’s because of what they tried to _do._ You know that.”

Aziraphale shrugged, toying with his cuff. “I just know that there’s been some rather bad press for homosexuals in the last few centuries.”

“But not coming from _me._ ” Crowley lifted his sunglasses, and not for the first time, Aziraphale wished he had an expression in his eyes to read. “You know none of that matters to me. If it’s honest, and true-”

“From your side, then.”

“No!” Crowley chewed his bottom lip. “For the sake of the Maker, ‘Zira, you _know_ I wouldn’t-”

Aziraphale cleared his throat softly, and for some reason that was enough for Crowley to fall back into silence. “The only point I was trying to make, my dear, is that what is good, and what is evil, seems to be different than it was when we first met. It’s hard to imagine Her smiting a city into the dust now.”

Crowley’s mouth twisted. “She hasn’t changed, though. That’s now how She works.”

“You would know better than I,” Aziraphale said, spreading his hands.  

“Sin is immutable. It doesn’t change. Humans - they may get it wrong, from time to time, but-”

“And who wrote Leviticus, Crowley? Wasn’t it an angel who gave those laws to the faithful?” Aziraphale said in a sharp tone, raising his voice. “Who was with Paul when he wrote, ‘Suffer not a woman to teach’? Where was God when Alexandria burned down? Or Constantinople?”

There was a time, he thought, when this would be impossible. A demon to talk to an angel like this - to criticise the Lord! For an angel to sit and listen to blasphemy - sacrilege. But Crowley didn’t look angry any more, just - devastated.

Aziraphale sighed, and felt his heart soften despite himself. He ran a hand over his face, surprised to find it warm. “I’m sorry.” 

“No.” Crowley blinked a couple of times, his hands clenching and unclenching reflexively on the table. “It’s okay.”

“I shouldn’t have-”

“It’s nothing that i haven’t wondered myself, Aziraphale,” he said quietly. “The difference is that I still have my faith.”

Aziraphale nodded slowly. The hole at the heart of himself, the wound that would not heal. His loss of Grace. “And I would not want to take it from you, my dear,” he managed to say eventually.

Crowley cleared his throat, took another sip of champagne. “I’ll - er - I’ll work on the wrath thing.”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, with a wan smile. “I’m sure there’s no harm done, anyway.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Sorry there's been a bit of a lag on this one - as is always the way of these things, I decided to rewrite the entire second half and then it ballooned in length.
> 
> Thank you so much to you all for reading (and leaving kudos and comments) - enjoy!

_London, 1918 AD_

1918 found Crowley post-demob and celebrating on a bench by the river, swigging from a half-bottle of dark, syrupy rum. It was a clear, bright November day, with a not unpleasant bite to the wind. The water was choppy and only a miracle kept him from losing his hat, but he was clean and dry, his long legs in herringbone blue stretched out in front of him.

There was a man a hundred yards or so down the river, leaning over the barrier to stare into the depths below. Crowley saw him flick the ash from his cigarette over the side, yellowing skin showing through the grey fingerless gloves here and there.

“Aziraphale?”

The demon turned, narrowed eyes just visible under his hat, wary of whoever might be calling him. A glimpse of bone-white curls, a brushstroke of stubble, dark circles under his eyes. Aziraphale took another hollow-cheeked draw on his cigarette and scanned the benches.

Crowley pulled the bottle of rum out of his trenchcoat pocket and waved it cheerfully.

Aziraphale gave a quick left-and-right swivel of his head, threw his cigarette in the river, and slowly walked over. He was in a badly-cut grey suit, scarf around his neck, and worst of all, a battered looking trilby tilted at what Aziraphale probably imagined was a rakish angle. The cuffs of his suit pooled around his ankles.

“What _are_ you wearing?” In the four years since he’d last seen him, Crowley hadn’t imagined that would be the first thing he’d say to the demon, but he couldn’t help it.

Aziraphale took a seat next to him on the bench, pushing the hat up with one finger so that Crowley could see his eyes. “I thought I looked quite stylish. I was told it’s very much ‘all the rage’.”

Crowley snorted. “Let me guess, by the bloke who sold it to you?” He passed over the bottle of rum.

Aziraphale took a look at the label closely. “Oh, Crowley, please tell me you haven’t been _drinking_ this.”

“S’what’s available,” Crowley said happily.

“It’s paint stripper, my dear.” Aziraphale uncorked it and took a sniff, his nose wrinkling.

“It’s rationing, what can you do?”

“Well, for a start, you could miracle up something a little more...palatable.” Aziraphale passed it back to him.

Crowley shrugged. “I’m counting my blessings.”

Aziraphale sighed, and got to his feet. “Come on, then. We can’t have this, when it looks like you’ve only just got back.” 

Crowley cocked his head - _how on earth does he know that?_ \- and Aziraphale just raised his eyebrows knowingly. He extended a hand to pull a slightly inebriated Crowley up from the bench.

Crowley was surprised to find himself taking it before he could consider whether it was a good idea, Aziraphale’s fingers cool and smooth beneath his, the fraying wool soft under his palm. It left an impression in his skin when Aziraphale pulled away, pulling out a pouch of rolling tobacco from an inside pocket, and leading them back towards the shops.

“When did this start?” Crowley gestured at the rolling paper in Aziraphale’s fingers. It couldn’t have been recently, given how expertly the demon was managing to roll himself a cigarette while navigating down the busy London streets.

“I always did enjoy the smell. And I like having something for my hands to do while I’m waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

Aziraphale gave him an unreadable smile as they got closer to a little grocer’s shop. “Can I ask you, how do you feel about crime these days?”

“Er- generally ‘anti’, though I suppose it depends on the law. British law, right? Not Her law?”

“Oh yes, British law,” Aziraphale mumbled, rolling his cigarette together and wetting the edge with his tongue.

Crowley looked at the sky in a practised, casual way. “I suppose I can turn a blind eye this time.”

Aziraphale gave him a surprisingly sly look, placing the cigarette behind one ear. 

They walked past the shop and around the corner, through a neatly kept alleyway. The demon knocked twice at a nondescript door, paused, then knocked once more.

There were some shuffling sounds, and the door was eventually ground open by a youth wearing a shopkeepers apron and jam jar glasses. He nodded to Aziraphale, then gave Crowley a long up-and-down look.

Aziraphale put a hand on Crowley’s elbow. “Just a friend, Arthur. I’ve come to pick up a couple of things for an evening out.”

The young man sniffed. “Alright Mister Fell,” he said, stepping back to pull the door open fully. “I’ll let my dad know.”

“That would be most kind,” Aziraphale beamed, sweeping in through the back door and heading down some poorly-lit steps to the cellar.

“Mr Fell?” Crowley said, trying not to trip and fall on Aziraphale as they headed downwards.

“Don’t you have an alias? I find it helps around the customers.”

Crowley hadn’t technically enlisted in the army, nor had he been listed as a member of any regiment, preferring to go where he was needed and let his miracles fill in the gaps. The idea that a human could need to refer to him by name at any point was, frankly, terrifying - as if your refrigerator might one day express an opinion about your choice of groceries.

Aziraphale snapped on a light switch in the corner of the room, and Crowley could see a small but spotless storeroom lined with shelves. Boxes were neatly stacked against one wall, and he could see the usual grocer’s fare of flour, tea, sugar in large airtight canisters.

“Are we making a cake? I didn’t bring my ration book.”

“No? I have a few spare I could lend you, if you like.” Aziraphale stopped by a box marked ‘MILK POWDER’ and opened the cardboard flaps at the top. He handed Crowley two or three large tins, which he regarded with bewilderment, before Aziraphale made a small ‘aha’ noise and pulled out two bottles of amber liquid.

“French brandy, my dear,” he said, exchanging the bottles for the tins and rearranging everything as it was when they arrived.

“You’re working with the black market?” Crowley said, peering at the labels. 1886, a good year.

“I wouldn’t say working...” Aziraphale took one of the bottles from him and concealed it under his arm. “I simply introduced some people I met to some other people, and it all sort of,” he made a circular motion with his wrist, “took off from there. A life of its own, really. But it has its perks.” He gave Crowley a bright smile. “Now. Your place or mine?”

Crowley had commandeered the top floor of an imposing building in Fitzrovia, rubbing elbows with artisans of all flavours - furniture makers and tailors, musicians and poets. His neighbours thought he had a flower shop somewhere, as his flat was packed almost to bursting with plants. In actuality he’d just ‘reclaimed’ them from their ungrateful owners - brown ferns pilfered from windowsills healed to a glossy green, under-watered jasmine now filling the air with sweet perfume.

Crowley hadn’t noticed the time passing so quickly until the first bottle of brandy was empty, seeing the streetlights flickering on through the bay window behind Aziraphale as he struggled to open another. Finally he managed to wedge his fingernail under the edge of the stopper, pulling it free with a satisfying ‘glunk’, and poured them both a generous measure.

Crowley tracked him with his eyes as Aziraphale sat back on his angular (and fairly uncomfortable) sofa, his too-full glass balanced carefully in both hands, fingertips pressed white against the rich brandy. His sleeves came up over his hands almost as far as his gloves did.

“Why _are_ you dressed like this?” Crowley asked, gesturing at the ensemble with a wave of his hand.

Aziraphale furrowed his brow, moved the glass aside to look down at himself, as if he needed a reminder of what he had put on that morning. “Like what, exactly?”

“S’just, you’ve always been about comfort in your clothes - getting as warm as possible, I thought. Wouldn’t a jumper be easier? People wear those in public again, you know.”

Aziraphale shifted, sitting up a little straighter in his seat. “This is what they expect, my dear. Anyone trading on the black market, they expect you to appear with a little...that is to say, they expect you to look like a ‘spiv’, I think they call it?”

Crowley barked a short laugh. “Oh my G- good grief, ‘Zira. Spivs are _well-dressed_.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale ran a hand over his suit jacket fussily, taking hold of a lapel in one hand and trying to pull it straight. All this actually did was pull the jacket over more towards Crowley, along with his fraying shirt, showing the merest glimpse of Aziraphale’s collarbone.

Crowley picked up his glass. “Okay, so - I mean, even if you did show up looking the part, rather than like a street urchin who got into his dad’s wardrobe - then you open your mouth and instead of, “Hi lads, wotcher?”, they hear, “Delighted to see you, dear boys!”’

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at the prissy, almost husky impression of him. “Perhaps I put on a voice.”

“‘Zira,” Crowley’s voice was cold, “tell me the truth. Don’t lie to me. _Do_ you put on a voice?”

“Cockney, actually.”

Crowley leaned forward, his brandy threatening to spill, peering over the top of his sunglasses into Aziraphale’s nonchalant expression. “Aziraphale. I _have_ to hear this voice."

Aziraphale sniffed. “Well, you’ve been so critical of every other part of my appearance this evening, I’m sure I don’t know _why_ I’d demonstrate my vocal talents for you now.”

“I’m sorry - whatever I said - I love _all_ of this,” he waved a hand, very carefully not looking at Aziraphale’s suit in case he cracked a smile, “and I promise I won’t say anything bad about your voice. Your beautiful Cockney impression, that I’m sure fools every gangster in the East End.”

Aziraphale put a finger to his lips. “Perhaps if you were able to give me a sincere - specific - compliment on my attire, I’d feel more inclined to share.”

Crowley tapped his teeth together, considering. “That’s easy, you’re-”

“I did say sincere _,_ ” Aziraphale interrupted, taking a sip of his drink and settling back.

Crowley huffed, tipping his head this way and that to take in the outfit, as if by looking at it from another angle it would suddenly come together. Top to toe, it was an unmitigated disaster. The best thing you could say about the shoes was that the two-inch tall cuffs hid the worst of the scuff marks. The shirt seemed to have an ambition of graduating to crochet with the number of holes it had, and the tie was a foot wide, in some kind of dizzying paisley, knotted about two inches below his collar. He let his eyes travel up further, taking in Aziraphale’s smile suppressed behind his glass, his clear, bright eyes fixed on the opposite wall for fear that he’d catch Crowley’s glance and start laughing. His ( _striped_!) trilby had been left by the door, mercifully.

“Ten seconds,” Aziraphale said, pretending to look at a watch he definitely did not own.

“Gahhhh,” Crowley said, mouth hanging open, leaning back over the sofa in case there was something on Aziraphale’s collar he could praise.

Aziraphale started counting down on his fingers. “Five, four-”

“I like - I like your tattoo,” Crowley said finally, in a rush.

Aziraphale blinked, two fingers still held in the air. “What tattoo?”

“The, you know,” Crowley motioned towards the small moth traced just under Aziraphale’s right ear, about as big as a twopenny piece, hair-thin tracing of patterns on its outstretched wings. “It’s nice. Delicate.” He swallowed. “It suits you.”

Aziraphale moved his right hand up towards his ear as if he was going to cover it with his hand, paused, and tugged on his collar instead. “Oh. Thank you. That’s very kind.” There was a little colour in his cheeks. “It’s not really a tattoo, though. More of an - identity card.”

Crowley saw the pulse just under Aziraphale’s jaw skip slightly, more human habits from six thousand years on Earth. He couldn’t be sure if the moth moved, under Aziraphale’s skin, or if it was just a trick of the light. He thought about reaching out, whether he’d feel soft wings under his fingertip.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “However, I think I did say that it had to be a compliment about my _clothing…_ ”

Crowley groaned. “Nooo - ‘Zira, please-”

“And as a matter of fact I don’t _just_ do a Cockney accent. I also do a rather good Welsh.”

Crowley grabbed at his chest suddenly, slumping back down against the cushions. “You are killing me here, you are _actually_ murdering me.”

Aziraphale twinkled. “Ah well. Perhaps another time.” He leaned forward to grab the neck of the bottle, topping up both their glasses.

Crowley continued to rub his chest, grumbling at Aziraphale over the top of his sunglasses.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I wonder if I might ask _you_ something, my dear.”

“Welll,” Crowley drawled, “I dunno if I’m in a mood to tell you anything after all of that.”

“I wondered if I might ask you about the war?”

“Oh.” Crowley sat up a little, picked up his glass. “What about it?”

Aziraphale shrugged, looking into his lap. “Well, I supposed I rather missed the whole thing. I’m assuming you were in Europe?”

“France.”

“What was it like?"

Crowley blew air out for a second. “‘Zira, come on. You’ve been to Europe. Good sausages, woeful public hygiene, places where the vowels outnumber the consonants ten to one. It’s all still there.” Crowley took another long sip of his brandy.

“I’m sure that devil-may-care attitude is terribly popular with humans, but I find it rather tiresome,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley squinted a little. “Devil-may-care?” _Do - do devil care?_ He cut that drunken train of thought off before it could go anywhere, and dragged it back to the rails of the conversation. “I guess, it was, it was a lot. Cold. Wet. You would’ve hated it. The rain got everywhere, and it was _always_ raining.”

Aziraphale tucked his jacket a little closer around his middle. “Where in France were you?”

“Ypres, mostly. I was in the trenches, but I moved around a lot, y’know, wherever they needed me. British, German, whichever.”

“You weren’t - fighting, were you?”

“No, come on,” Crowley wrinkled his nose, “stretcher bearer, that’s me. An’ ambulance driver, when they’d let me. People in pain. Trying to help out.”

“What was it like?”

Crowley laid his head on the back of the sofa, taking in the impressively Artex-ed ceiling as he thought about how to answer. His memories of the front lines were a blur of mud and rain, the corrugated iron they used to line the trenches and mugs of very sweet tea. A strawberry plant he’d found thriving at the bottom of a crater, as if it had been plucked from the gardens of England and transported whole to the battlefield.

“Lonely, mostly,” he said finally, eyes tracking the wave pattern in the plaster above him. “Everybody, both sides - all sides - thought it’d be over soon as spit. Couldn’t believe they were still there after four months, let alone four years.” He exhaled slowly. “You ever been anywhere nobody wants to be?”

“It’s possible,” Aziraphale said dryly. “I hope _you_ weren’t lonely, my dear.”

Crowley tipped his head to one side to catch sight of Aziraphale’s clear eyes. “I was worried about you.”

Aziraphale blinked. “Why? In case I was hurt?”

“Nah,” Crowley waved a hand, “knew you wouldn’t be hurt. Even if you were discorporated you’d claw your way upstairs again pretty da- toot suite. But I looked for you, before I hopped over the Channel.” He remembered the desperation to do something building under his shoulderblades, the dash from pub to restaurant to off-licence to track down Aziraphale before he headed off to a conflict that he could tell would certainly _not_ be over by Christmas. “Couldn’t find you. Worried we might cross paths on the frontlines. See you behind the sights,” he slopped brandy on his leg, miming holding a machine gun with both hands, “or manning a mortar. Or something.”

“Oh.” There was a creaking sound from the cushion springs as Aziraphale shifted, and then he realised that Aziraphale had mimicked his position, laying his head along the back of the sofa, looking up with him. “I’m sorry I worried you. It wasn’t my intention, believe me.”

Crowley managed a half-shrug. “S’alright. Just thought - I dunno - She doesn’t play favourites with nations, despite what the poetry says. But I wasn’t sure if your side does.”

“In my experience, evil is too broad to be assigned to just one side.” Aziraphale tipped his head down to take a slow sip of his brandy, then lay back. “It’s the _chaos_ that they like Below. It doesn’t particularly matter who’s responsible. In fact, I told them the war was all my idea.”

Crowley managed a hoarse chuckle. “Great. How many’s that for you in the ‘win’ column now? Fire of London, Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades…”

“They don’t seem to care about the personal touch any more,” Aziraphale said, almost wistfully. “It’s big, round numbers that look good in the reports.”

Crowley hummed. “Very different upstairs, let me tell _you._ All personal. Over-personal, even.”

“Yes, I can quite imagine.”

Crowley realised with distant horror that their combined weight on the sofa was causing the cushions to dip, making both of them loll drunkenly into the centre. Their shoulders were already touching, Aziraphale’s persistent chill like a cool compress seeping through his jacket. He decided not to move. _He_ was an angel. This was practically a benediction.

He cleared his throat. “Where were you then?”

“Oh,” a long sigh. “I was asleep, I’m afraid.”

“Asleep?”

“From about July 1914, yes. I saw the writing on the wall, as it were, and thought it best to take a long holiday.” Aziraphale raised his glass to the ceiling, toasting himself.

Crowley furrowed his brow. “Why?”

“Well, it’s like you said. War is chaos, and humanity certainly had its fill of that. I didn’t really see that I had much to offer while the whole thing was going on.”

Crowley turned his head slightly to read Aziraphale’s expression, slipping his sunglasses onto the top of his head to focus a little easier. Aziraphale didn’t move, still staring up at the ceiling, his almost-transparent eyes, his almost-transparent skin. The tattooed moth’s wings were folded away.

“‘Zira, you can’t just sleep for four years.”

“Actually it’s fairly easy, with enough blankets. And if you remember to cancel the milk.”

“Why didn’t you just - enjoy yourself? Go to your favourite restaurants? Even being blitzed out of your gourd for four years would be better than being _asleep_.”

Aziraphale snuck a glance at him out of the corner of his eye. “I seem to have scandalised you, my dear. I _am_ sorry. If it helps, I did wake up at some point in 1917 for a cup of coffee and a cigarette.”

Crowley sat up, elbow balanced on the back of the sofa, and looked down at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Aziraphale gave him an unreadable, far-away look. _He slept for four years but he still looks so tired,_ Crowley thought. _He wears damnation like a shroud._ “If I’d known you were asleep-”

“Why should you have known?” Aziraphale said with genuine confusion.

“Well - we’re friends. Aren’t we?”

Aziraphale regarded him silently, one slow blink, then two. “What do you feel from them?” He gestured towards the window. “Humans.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Aziraphale closed one eye, thinking. “I don’t remember very much from that time, but I remember that in the Garden, I could feel Adam and Eve’s love around them. I think sometimes I could even see it, like a colour in the air.”

Crowley shifted, suddenly embarrassed. “Oh. Yeah. I guess I can feel that. Why?”

“Because I can’t any more, my dear. I only get the grey side of that particular spectrum.” He rolled his head to one side to look out of the window. “I can feel hatred, and anger, and pain, as if it were a thick fog lying over the city. I can taste disgust and fear when I enter a room.” He held up his palms, running his thumb over the pads of his fingers. “And in 1914 my skin was sticky with it, greasy with the anxiety and madness of a whole country. A whole continent!” He turned back to Crowley. “Wouldn’t you sleep through that?”

Crowley licked his lips, still sitting up over Aziraphale. “But I felt that too. I guess angels need to feel the good _and_ the bad. Makes sense why they wouldn’t’ve given you guys the good, I suppose. It was bad, in the war, but honestly, it was better to be there. Better than being here, not able to help.”

Aziraphale smiled sadly. “Ah, but I _can’t_ help.”

Crowley sighed. “Come on, ‘Zira, we both know that you’re not exactly the world’s most diabolical fiend.”

“Well, no, but-”

“Even this whole black market thing is just a way for you to help people, right?”

Aziraphale froze, his mouth open. He moved his glass to his other hand, pushed himself to sit a little straighter. “ _Help_ people?”

Crowley had a feeling like he was heading out into No Man’s Land with a dodgy torch, but the fog of alcohol in his brain wouldn’t let him slow down. “Well, yeah, I mean, on the one hand, you get your spirits, and your cigarettes, and I’m sure you get some nice little French and Italian fancies. Chocolate, amaretti biscuits, that sort of thing?”

Aziraphale didn’t respond.

“And then on the other hand, it’s like - oh, poor Widow such-and-such, she’s got eighteen kids and nothing to give them - oh, here’s nice Mr Fell with a leg of lamb for Sunday dinner-”

“Crowley, stop.”

“-and some bloody Victoria sponge for afters, and-”

“ _Crowley.”_

He had never heard that tone from Aziraphale before. His cheeks were flushed, he could see his teeth gritted through thin lips.

“Is that what you think of me?” Aziraphale almost spat, flashing eyes fixed on Crowley’s. “That I’m just waiting around for you to notice me, welcome me back?”

Crowley swallowed. “What, me?”

Aziraphale jerked his chin upwards. “The plural you, Crowley. Above.” He steeled himself. “ _Heaven.”_

“I mean, I…” Crowley trailed off. He couldn’t find it in himself to lie, couldn’t swear that in his heart of hearts he didn’t have a secret, shameful hope of returning a fallen angel to his rightful home. A truly penitent angel, who hadn’t taken part in the Rebellion, who didn’t mean to Fall, but had sort of - stumbled blindly into it.

“You are _ridiculous_.” Aziraphale got to his feet, disinebriating himself with a snap of his fingers and a full-body shudder.

Crowley felt like he should follow his example, but he was still processing the whiplash speed of the conversation, the sudden change of tone. He reached out and gripped Aziraphale’s jacket. “Aziraphale, come on-”

Aziraphale tugged the fabric out of his hand. “You don’t un-Fall, Crowley.” He took a breath, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Now. It really has been a most - a _mostly_ pleasant evening. I think I shall go home.”

Crowley finally clicked his fingers, feeling the alcohol drain out of his body, the flavour evaporate from his tongue, leaving behind a bitter, medicinal taste. He shook his head a little to clear it, the resulting hangover passing through at mach speed. “Wait, wait, wait.” He stood up, heading after Aziraphale.

Aziraphale was at the door, gently placing his disgusting hat on his head, and tipping it to one side with a single finger as he’d no doubt seen in some film or other. _Oh Lord,_ thought Crowley, _he really_ does  _think it looks rakish._

“Aziraphale,” he said, hands up. “Don’t leave. It’s the middle of the night.”

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. “It’s barely five o’clock.”

Crowley made a face. Telling time seemed to have gotten harder back in civilian life, without regular watch changes and meal calls to guide him. “Okay, fine, but still - stay.”

“Stay where?”

Crowley gestured at a closed door off to the side. “I’ve got a bedroom, just like you - big old bed, loads of room.”

Aziraphale just stared at him.

“And obviously I’d be on the sofa.” Crowley patted the back of the sofa, trying not to wince when he hit the corner of the metal frame with the side of his palm. “It’s much more comfortable than it looks.”

Aziraphale gave him an odd look. “Crowley, I was _just_ sitting on it. I know exactly how stupidly uncomfortable it is.”

“Well, then,” Crowley took a step forward desperately, “let me call you a taxi.”

“Crowley-”

“Right, sorry, you don’t want me to know where you live.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Why would you think that?”

Crowley faltered. “I mean - I know you have a bedsit above a - what was it? An anarchist printing press?” Sounded like a dreadful place to get some rest, as far as Crowley was concerned, but Aziraphale had said that the noise of the machinery was somewhat soothing. “But I’ve never - you’ve never let me see it. I just figured you didn’t _want_ me to see it.”

Aziraphale looked around Crowley’s impressive flat - the vaulted ceilings, the bay windows with their view over the city, the bursts of colour from the flowers at carefully placed intervals. “I’m not sure it would be to your taste, my dear.”

Crowley shrugged. “ _You_ must like it. You spent four years in it.”

“I wouldn’t - necessarily - say that,” Aziraphale said, mouth twisted over to one side. He fiddled with his cuff.

“Well, look, I’ll call, you can give them your address,” Crowley opened the door to his bedroom, the big iron-wrought double bed, the thick grey rug, the gauzy curtains, “and I’ll just pop in here while you tell them where to go. No bother at-”

“It’s Whitechapel,” Aziraphale said quietly. “It’s on the high street.” He was looking over Crowley’s shoulder at the bedroom, eyebrows knitted together for a reason Crowley couldn’t decipher. “It really isn’t much.”

“Great,” Crowley said with relief. “I’ll telephone now.”

He took a step forward, about to move past Aziraphale to the telephone in the living room, but was stopped by the demon’s hand on his arm. He looked up into those clear cut-glass eyes.

Aziraphale gave him a very small smile. “Do make sure you _call_ first, if you feel like dropping in. So I can tidy up a bit, my dear.”

*******

_London, 1942 AD_

Aziraphale awoke in a panic, panting open-mouthed, blinking frantically until he could focus on the ceiling above him. Indulging these human whims had human consequences, and though his heart didn’t need to beat nor his skin release moisture to cool itself, nevertheless his pulse was pounding and his pyjamas were stuck to him.

He placed a palm on his chest, willing his heartbeat to slow and his breathing to calm. Just home, asleep on his rather threadbare sofa, the three-bar fire hissing away companionably. He took a breath and stretched his arms out over his head, reaching for his rolling tobacco perched haphazardly on a stack of books.

How long had he been asleep? Two years? Three? Lighting his roll-up, he took a look through the rather grimy window on the other wall - moths gathered at the corners like snowflakes. Even in the middle of the day he could see barrage balloons anchored to buildings in the distance. The second Great War was still in full force, it seemed. He closed his eyes, exhaling a plume of smoke, and let his mind drift outwards - tasted rage, sorrow, fear. Humanity was putting Hell out of business yet again.

Aziraphale pinched out his cigarette (he’d had a nasty experience in the late 1920s falling asleep with one still alight, and had singed a rather nice fur given to him by Attila the Hun) and burrowed back down into his warm nest, tucking the blankets over his head.

He didn’t know if recurring nightmares were part of the human experience, or if it was part of Her punishment to the fallen. He could have asked Crowley, but there were some questions that seemed to upset him, made his eyes go wide or his mouth pull in tight and concerned. (A brief description of Hell’s disciplinary process for late reports had drained all the blood from the angel’s face, since which time Aziraphale tended to gloss over the more extreme elements of bureaucracy Below.) 

He supposed he could have asked a human, but the humans he saw on a regular basis weren’t really the sort of people one could talk to about their sleeping habits without risking a terrible misunderstanding - and, of course, humans seemed to only be capable of sleeping for ten hours or so at a time. Perhaps fourteen at a pinch. If there were only a human who could sleep for four years or more, they could compare notes.

He was awoken just a few hours later (probably - the sun seemed to be roughly where it had been, although that didn’t rule out it being tomorrow, or next week) by a fierce, unceasing pounding at his front door.

Hell.

Instantly his clever human body flooded his system with adrenaline, blood rushing to heart and lungs and brain, time seeming to stretch and slow down for him to process his next move. He threw the blankets onto the floor (over the three-bar fire, but it couldn’t be helped) and quickly stepped to the window, looking to his left to make sure they hadn’t made it into the hall yet.

One snap of his fingers to disapparate the glass, and he was looking out at a sheer wall below him into the untidy little garden. The moths, displaced by the sudden disappearance of their home, streamed out over his shoulders, heading for safer territory - rats abandoning the sinking ship. 

 _Too far to jump, but perhaps I could fly?_ He hadn’t used his wings for flight in a long time, but they would surely carry him to at least the next building over. _Just like falling off a log,_ he thought, _only without the falling, I hope_. With a small effort he manifested them, spreading out behind him and threatening to knock his collection of dirty coffee cups onto the floor. It had been years since he’d last seen his wings, and they were in no better condition than before, the edges indistinct like a heat haze. Perhaps they wouldn’t support his weight after all.

The front door splintered as someone tore it off its hinges.

“Aziraphale!”

He paused with one knee on the ledge where the window had been, parted the feathers of his left wing to peer through. “Crowley?”

Crowley looked just as he remembered him - neatly pressed suit, shined shoes, Italian sunglasses. But his face was twisted into a furious snarl, a tendon in his neck standing out like a suspension rod on Tower Bridge. He was clutching a newspaper in one fist, brandishing it like a weapon.

Aziraphale put his foot back on the floor, folded his wings behind himself. “My dear, what on earth-”

Crowley hit him in the chest with the paper. “Read it,” he said through clenched teeth. He looked over at the rest of the room - the dirt, the debris, the fish and chip wrappers.

Aziraphale realised with a start that this was the first time Crowley had visited him at home, such as it was. He shivered, the gaping hole in the wall behind him sucking all of the heat from the room. He was dressed only in pyjamas. “Um - my dear, _really,_ this isn’t-”

Crowley reached down and switched off the three-bar fire, kicked the balled-up blankets into a corner. His fists were clenching and unclenching. “Big, round numbers, you said. You must be proud of this one.”

Aziraphale frowned, finally uncrumpling the newspaper enough to read the headline. It took several passes over the words before they sank into his brain. “Oh my G- is this true?”

Crowley laughed hoarsely. “Oh, it’s true, alright. It’s the headline in every paper in the country.” He pulled his sunglasses off, dropped them onto the sofa. His eyes were aflame. “Did you know?”

Aziraphale pulled his hand away from his mouth. “I’ve been asleep since 1939, I swear.”

“I know you didn’t _do_ this,” Crowley growled, “but they did. Your _side_.”

“They wouldn’t, I swear. Hell is - it’s no picnic-”

“ _No picnic?_ ”

Aziraphale held up both his hands. “Crowley, just consider it for a moment. The deaths of,” he swallowed, “so many innocent people, although a - a truly horrible tragedy - it wouldn’t serve the aims of Hell. Better for humanity to be on earth where their souls can be damned - their deaths would just be - pointless.” Aziraphale winced as Crowley kicked his heater into the wall.

“All wars serve Hell, Aziraphale, they’ve been happening over and over again since the beginning of time!” He pointed a finger in Aziraphale’s direction. “Don’t you _dare_ tell me this isn’t your responsibility.”

Aziraphale bristled. “My _responsibility_? I’ve never killed anyone in my life. Can you say the same?” It was out of his mouth before he could catch it, as if the chill sweeping into the room was soaking into his heart, into his tone.

Crowley regarded him with that gaze again, the searing flames of Heaven’s light - but then Aziraphale had much more experience with fire than he did.

“Gomorrah, again? Will we ever stop talking about that?”

“I don’t know - you tell  _me_ how long one is allowed to hold a grudge on the destruction of an entire city,” Aziraphale said sharply, raising his eyebrows.

Crowley shook his head. “Lord, you are the most _infuriating_ -” He broke off in a frustrated, guttural noise. He nodded to a nest of insects in one of the ceiling corners. “A moth is the perfect form for you, Aziraphale. All you do is gnaw holes in people’s faith.”

Aziraphale felt the chill descend to his stomach. “Do tell, my dear,” he said, with ice in his veins.

Crowley picked up a pair of Aziraphale’s gloves from a table, wool already starting to unwind from one of the fingers. “You find a thread, and you pull and pull, you eat away at people until they don’t know what to think.” He yanked at the loose wool suddenly and snapped it, tossing it back onto the table. “All you’re good for is sowing doubt in good people.”

Aziraphale realised his mouth was open. He managed a bitter laugh. “My dear, if you didn’t have doubts over Her motives before talking with me, you are either blind or - or idiotic.”

Crowley’s eyes widened at the flagrant blasphemy, still shocking after all these years. He stalked over to him, jabbing a finger into his chest. “You revel in it, don’t you? You’ve broken all of Her laws. Stealing, lying, murder-”

Aziraphale pulled himself up to his full height as Crowley pressed his back against the wall next to the window, the tops of his wings bumping the plaster painfully. “I have _never_ -”

“What about Lindisfarne, eh? You might not have wielded the sword, Aziraphale, but _you_ brought the soldiers.”

There was nowhere to look now but Crowley’s eyes, his pitiless expression, his face close enough to devour him whole. “That was a misunderstanding - you _know_ I didn’t mean for-”

“And look how dirty this place is. Look at you!” Crowley gestured at Aziraphale’s wings over his shoulder. “What is that, ash? Grime?”

Aziraphale swallowed. It was a fact of life Below that one’s animal form - whether lizard, frog, fly or moth - did tend to impact on one’s _true_ form, whether intentional or not. Hastur’s wings were a dull green, almost scaly. Beelzebub herself had wings that were slightly transparent, iridescent, more chitin than feathers.

It was a mercy of living upstairs that Aziraphale did not often have cause to manifest his wings. Thankfully his feathers had remained from his time Above, but the colour had faded to a dull camouflage brown, almost striped in some places, whorls of black and white in others. Despite the occasional offer from a demon or two, no one else had ever touched them. He groomed them himself only when absolutely necessary, a quick, almost brutal process - skin repulsed by the papery, ragged feel of them. Just like anything around him, they were often fraying, the edges furry like insect legs.

Beneath Crowley’s disgusted look, he struggled to hold his chin up. “That’s just the colour they are. We can’t _all_ be peacocks.”

Crowley barrelled on, hot breath against his face. “So what does that leave, then? Adultery, I think we’ll skip over - though I’m sure it’s come up in a temptation or too, right?”

Aziraphale said nothing.

Crowley grinned humourlessly. “And you covet. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you staring.”

Aziraphale’s heart sank to somewhere near his knees. “Covet?” he managed, weakly.

“You are _so desperate_ to get back what you once lost. You’re so _jealous_ of those of us who didn’t Fall. That’s why you have to destroy all the good in the world, Aziraphale. You _have_ to bring us down to your level.” In direct comparison to Aziraphale’s, he manifested his wings suddenly, blinding white filling the whole room, now just the two of them wrapped in a cocoon of feathers.

Aziraphale breathed for a moment, looking into Crowley’s eyes - and then he couldn’t help it. It bubbled up, manic - his laughter filled the room. There were tears in his eyes.

“You think - you _really think-_ ”

For the first time since he’d kicked the door in, Crowley looked off-balance.

Aziraphale was laughing so much that he had to bend forward to hold his sides, his curls brushing Crowley’s cheek briefly.

Crowley took hold of his pyjama lapels and hauled him back up into a standing position, trying to force eye contact again. “What’s so funny?”

Aziraphale bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. “Just - oh my goodness. _Crowley_. You’re not blind, but you are _certainly_ an idiot.”

Crowley’s fists tightened on the fabric, but it made no difference.

“My goodness, the ego! I wouldn’t return Above if you _paid me_.” Aziraphale paused, wrinkled his nose. “No, wait, that’s a poor analogy - I wouldn’t return to the host if you gave me my old position back, plus a flaming sword, and then - oh - let me build a universe of my very own. Is that clear enough for you?”

Crowley’s mouth twisted to one side. “More blasphemy? More lies?”

Aziraphale placed his hands over Crowley’s, trying not to react to the heavenly warmth against his skin. “Shall we examine _your_ sins, my dear?”

“Don’t change the-”

“How about the cardinal sins? Gluttony, sloth - well, we’ve had enough lazy Sunday lunches for you to check _those_ off.” Aziraphale leaned out to one side, forehead brushing against feathers hot as sunlight, and took a look down at Crowley’s suit. “I think this level of tailoring certainly counts as avarice.” He flexed his fingers on the backs of Crowley’s hands, twisted in his pyjamas. “And naturally, you have wrath in _spades_.”

Crowley let go of him, took a small step back, Aziraphale stepping forward to match him as if they were dancing.

“And what does that leave?” Aziraphale started marking items off on the fingers of one hand. “Your ego qualifies you for the sin of pride, I should think. Envy - I know you’ve always bristled under Gabriel’s yoke, perhaps you’d prefer to be in his position?”

“Never,” Crowley spat.

Aziraphale shrugged. “Well, someone who loves beautiful things as much as you cannot live without envy, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s Kew Botanical Gardens you covet?” He popped the ‘t’ with his tongue, giving Crowley a sharp look. “And then that just leaves lust. Which, my dear, really, that is between you and your maker.” He dropped his voice to an ear-piercing whisper. “But I have to say that I have noticed that you’re, ah, ‘making an effort’ a lot more than you used to.” He looked down pointedly. “Why would an angel need _that?_ ”

Crowley swallowed. “That’s - piss off, it’s just for the tailoring-”

Aziraphale held his hands up. “Absolutely none of my business. But that’s seven for seven, don’t you agree?”

Crowley rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “All of that - the food, the sleep, the clothes - all of that was _your idea._ I never wanted _any_ of it!”

“Until a demon tempted you? Really, that doesn’t speak to a very strong will. I’ve known humans hold out longer.”

Crowley looked at him over his hands. “You are the most despicable-”

“Well, my dear, that’s rather the point, isn’t it? I am a demon, after all. Sinning is what I do best.” Aziraphale discorporated his wings, and dressed himself in a comfortable jumper and trousers with a snap of his fingers. “I mean, I don’t want to upset you, but in Hell’s stakes, this really wasn’t even much of an argument.”

“I haven’t fin-”

Aziraphale continued talking, moving past Crowley to take a seat on the sofa. “I mean, how did you think I had survived in Hell so long? I’m hardly physically imposing. Why do you suppose I’m the only demon remaining on Earth?” 

Aziraphale felt it was more of a combination of cowardice and laziness, but it was true that he had, at one point, managed to garner somewhat of a reputation Below for cutting remarks. There was a rumour that he had been the first person to introduce sarcasm to the British Isles. And he had, of course, known Oscar Wilde.

Crowley removed his wings with a moment’s thought, moving to the gaping hole in the room where the window had been. He leaned on the ledge with both hands, his shoulders suddenly hunched. “I have more to say, Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale began rolling himself another cigarette. “Why are you here?”

Crowley looked over his shoulder sharply. “I told you, I read the headlines, and I - how can you just-”

“But why come here? Why not just go to Europe, my dear? Why come here, to abuse my furniture?”

“It’s - obviously I _want_ to go, I just-” Crowley ground his teeth for a few moments.

Aziraphale lit his cigarette and took a long drag, exhausting it almost halfway. He pretended not to see Crowley’s poorly disguised distaste as he blew it out in a steady stream towards the ceiling. 

There was a minute or so of silence, of Crowley digging his fingernails into the splintering wood of the windowframe. 

Aziraphale felt the sick, shivering feeling under his skin start to dissipate, his hands no longer vice-tight. He pulled a strand of loose tobacco from under his tongue. “They won’t let you go, will they?”

Crowley seemed to deflate, his head hanging low. “No.”

“Why not?”

“There’s - god _damn-”_

It was still so shocking to hear Crowley use the ‘d’ word.

Crowley turned around, leaned back against the windowframe, silhouetted against the early afternoon sunshine. “They want me to bless a whole boatload of people next month. Clergy, army officials, politicians. To help with the war effort, they said.”

Aziraphale shrugged. “Well then. That’s nice and easy. I can do all that for you while you fly overseas.”

He couldn’t read Crowley’s expression between his glittering eyes and the light behind him, but he thought he saw his jaw drop. “You - you still want to keep to the arrangement?”

Aziraphale extinguished his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, placed it in his trouser pocket, and got to his feet. “My dear, I’m not made of stone. If there’s something we can do together that will - that will balance the scales a little-”

“Do good, you mean,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale winced. “Please. I’m trying to fix this, but there _are_ limits.” He spread his hands, took a breath. “Ultimately, perhaps we would bring the war to a close a little sooner, get the supply lines back - I can’t _abide_ rationing, as you know.”

It looked like Crowley might be smiling - just a tiny, tiny bit. “It would be a long time to be me,” he said slowly. “I can pop back every so often, but it could be months.”

Aziraphale shrugged.

“And water the plants.”

“I can promise no more than my best.” Aziraphale held out his hand. “Are we in agreement?”


	5. Chapter 5

_London, 2008 AD_

In the early fifties, when Crowley’s flat had been so crowded that he was at risk of falling out the window should he pilfer one more half-dead rubber plant, he’d finally decided to open a plant shop. His reasoning was, firstly, that plants were healing for people and for the environment, and so he would be incrementally increasing the stock of goodness in the world. If nothing else, the fight against London’s air pollution could only be counted as a win. Secondly, by interacting with humanity on a daily basis, there would be no end of candidates for blessings, benedictions and general good deeds, which, given that instructions from Heaven had slowed to a trickle lately, would allow him to keep his hand in, as it were.

Of course, he hadn’t bothered _actually_ running it past Gabriel, but these were the carefully thought out justifications he came up with should anyone Above suddenly check in.

He’d managed to find premises in the heart of Borough Market of all places, miraculously right next door to Aziraphale’s favourite cheese shop. Even more miraculously, it came with a very spacious back garden and, after a few years without any sternly worded missives from his side, a large greenhouse.

He called it Sansevieria, after one of his most commonly rescued plants (though people seemed to have trouble with the Latin, and he’d heard it shortened to ‘Sansy’s’, as in the Yelp review that said, ‘The hot guy with the sunglasses from Sansy’s turned up at my flat uninvited with a watering can, and said if I didn’t know how to look after an orchid, then I shouldn’t have bought one - four-and-a-half stars’). Much to Aziraphale’s endless amusement, he had also been forced to come up with a human pseudonym to interact with his customers. Aziraphale had suggested Mr Leigh (“First name Crow”) but in a moment of desperation, hungover and confronted with some piece of council paperwork, Crowley had ended up going with the two most common names (in his estimation): Adam Smith.

In the spacious plot of land, he’d planted two raised beds for fruits and vegetables, a deep, wide pot for herbs (keeping the virulent mint to a little grey container of its own, lest it overwhelm everything), and given the rest over to colour. Bedding plants like pansies and peonies towards the front, clematis and honeysuckle over an ornamental arch by the back gate, and wildflowers growing in a rocky patch behind the greenhouse. He had dwarf fruit trees, cherry and lemon and apple, that he dutifully dragged in and out of the greenhouse year round to keep them alternately cool or hot, depending on the vagaries of the British weather.

Crowley had let his hair grow out after the turn of the new millennium, red curls now at their longest nearly brushing the tops of his shoulders, and often held back by what Crowley steadfastly called a chignon, but Aziraphale dryly referred to as a ‘man-bun’. He still had his pressed suits and silk shirts hanging in his wardrobe, ready for dinners at the Savoy and evenings at the theatre, but the daily grind found him most often in brown workman’s trousers, a linen shirt, and (Aziraphale for some reason found this ‘adorable’) braces.

In fact, on this bright May day, he was indulging in the demon’s least-favourite pastime: he was barefoot. There was something about the feeling of soil between his toes that he found almost electrifying, particularly when the weather turned warmer, and if nothing else it gave him a good handle on which plants needed more or less water. (Aziraphale said things like, wasn’t he getting terribly dirty, and what if there were broken glass or a tin can, my dear, and what about the _bugs_? To which Crowley had amiably replied, that if it was good enough for almost all of humanity throughout history, then it was good enough for him; that he knew _exactly_ what was in the soil given that he’d dug the whole thing out himself; and that if bugs bothered him at all, then they wouldn’t be friends, would they?)

All this, along with the slight tan that he’d gotten tired of miracling away day after day, gave him a fairly workman-like look, though Aziraphale had a distressing tendency to call it ‘pre-Raphaelite’ instead, and ask him if he’d hold an apple and pose for a painting.

Spotting a dark spot on one of his tomato plants, Crowley squatted down next to his vegetable bed and lifted a leaf. Sure enough, there was a plump little slug chomping away on the roots. He picked it up with thumb and forefinger and brought it close to his face, the slug writhing in a desperate attempt to get away.

Crowley pushed his sunglasses up to the top of his head and regarded the beast with fiery eyes. “Now, I thought we’d talked about this,” he said seriously to the slug. “We had a good long chat about how it would be better for you to hang out in somebody else’s garden. I thought you’d seen my point of view, really, I did.” He ran a protective hand over the plant’s other leaves, seeing with the dismay the small chunks bitten out here and there.

The slug didn’t reply.

“I don’t want to have to take drastic measures, you know?” Crowley got to his feet, and headed to the greenhouse. “This is an environmentally friendly garden, I won’t use poisons or pesticides. But really, there have to be _limits._ ” Swinging open the greenhouse door, he popped the slug into an empty plastic pot on the workbench. He picked up a pair of well-worn garden shears, and a sharpening steel, and began running one over the other in long, low strokes.

“I mean, I try to do the right thing. I tended to the very _first_ Garden, did you know that? Well, I say ‘tended’, what I actually did was _defend_ it.” He opened and closed the shears experimentally with a silk-soft ‘snik-snik’ noise, then apparently unsatisfied, continued to sharpen them. “Oh, it was a different world back then. You wouldn’t just lead someone back out to the exit, first offence, don’t do it again. _Oh_ no.”

Crowley bent low over the pot, the slug cowering at the very bottom. “But, like I say. Different world.” He leaned forward with the shears, reaching over the pot - and snipped off a browning tip from the rosemary behind it.

“Right. I should think we understand each other now?” He picked up the pot cheerfully, headed back out into the garden and popped the slug over the fence into the patch of wasteland next door.

He dropped his sunglasses back on his nose, still squinting against the morning sun. “Wow. Didn’t know slugs could move that fast.”

There was a shuffling noise behind him, as of someone carefully picking their way through a packed flower garden in quite a lot of warm clothing.

Crowley turned, and saw a hideous - seemingly inflatable - purple beast, covered in shining scales, with two hollow eyes peering out from an entirely black mask of a face.

For some reason, his first thought was that the slugs were fighting back - that they’d mobilised some variety of giant slug, or formed themselves into an amalgamation, to repay in kind the type of psychological warfare that he’d been inflicting on them. In desperation, rather than summoning his holy spear, he threw the first thing that came to hand. Thankfully, as he’d left the shears in the greenhouse, this was just a small, empty, plastic pot.

It bounced off the creature’s head with a small ‘pnk’ sound, and the monster made a muffled noise that was a combination of confusion and disapproval.

“Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale unbuttoned the front of his hood, pulling it back to reveal that he was wearing a full balaclava, only eyes and mouth visible. “Just a moment,” he said, struggling to pull it off, “ _blasted_ thing always gets stuck under my jumper.”

Crowley swallowed, his dry lips sticking together. He put a hand on his chest to will his pulse to chill out a bit. “Where on earth did you get a _puffer jacket_ in this millennia?”

Aziraphale finally managed to pull his head free of the balaclava, his wild curls spilling out and giving the impression that he’d just exploded a tube of toothpaste all over his head. He patted at them distractedly to move the worst of them out of his eyes. “It’s the most marvellous thing, I was just passing the shop for the blind on the high street, and I thought - _hello_ , what’s this? Because you know I haven’t had a _really_ warm coat since that old fur, and after that incident with the protestors-”

“What charity shop is open at 8 o’clock in the morning?” Crowley circled him, taking in the full extent of the abomination, carefully stepping between seedlings.

Aziraphale shoved his balaclava into one of the many deep pockets lining the jacket. “Ah. Well. I should say, it was _outside_ the shop.”

“In a bag?” Crowley asked suspiciously.

“In a _sort_ of a bag, I suppose. Yes.”

“Stealing from charity shops. How fiendish of you,” Crowley said dryly.

Aziraphale shrugged helplessly. “I suppose the devil makes work for idle hands.”

He took Aziraphale upstairs for a cup of tea. Given that the second floor above the shop was all just storage space, taken over by piles of gardening tools, neatly labelled packets of seeds, and unstable towers of plant pots, this may require some explanation.

After Crowley had moved all his plants from Fitzrovia to Borough Market, he’d held on to the flat there for a little while. But London doesn’t stand still for long, and he soon found that all the things that had brought him to the area - the bohemian lifestyle, his creatively-inclined neighbours, the little coffee shop on the corner where you could run into revolutionaries and poets - all sort of melted away. The coffee shop closed down, his neighbours passed on or moved away, and as for bohemia - the Post Office tower was the last nail in that particular coffin. When the final piece of scaffolding was removed from the looming edifice in 1964, Crowley likewise packed up his few possessions (disapparating the furniture to the ether from whence it came) and fled to the shop.

The shop was entirely unfit to live in, of course, even with the industry of an angel - too noisy, too dusty, too cluttered with the various things he needed to run it. But the greenhouse was perfect - out amongst the plants (where, due to the British weather that not even a host of heaven could persuade to behave, he often needed to be at short notice in case of hailstorm or sudden frost), plenty of light, and most importantly, unnoticed.

It had only taken a short, pleasant conversation with the greenhouse, a few pleading smiles and a promise to replace a cracked pane at the back, before it sprouted a short flight of stairs leading up to a one-bedroom flat on the second floor (naturally not visible from the outside, despite the glass).

The bedroom had a soft king-size bed (Crowley had upgraded from the frustratingly noisy springs in Fitzrovia to something called ‘memory foam’), the bathroom had a claw-foot tub (he’d enjoyed bathing since his time in Rome, and the invention of indoor plumbing had been a tremendous relief for both of them), and there was even a well-appointed kitchen, with all the modern conveniences one would expect (or at least Crowley would expect, which meant a kettle and a refrigerator, and a hob that variously appeared or disappeared as he reached for it absent-mindedly).

Aziraphale sat in his usual spot at the table by the window, his puffer jacket mercifully hung up by the front door. Crowley cast a quick eye over him as he poured the tea - a shirt under a jumper or two, corduroy trousers, and Aziraphale _would_ insist on wearing those sheepskin boots everywhere, so that he looked like a dock worker on a break. And, of course, those woolen fingerless gloves. For a demon who’d chosen to be a moth, he persisted in wearing wool, and the blasted things just unravelled after a week or two.

Even now Aziraphale was pulling at one of the loose ends vaguely as he looked out of the window, wrapping the thread back and forth around his finger, tugging the weave free.

Crowley frowned, heading over to him, and pulled the piece of wool free from his hands. He twirled his index finger, casting a quick miracle to make it snake its way back into the fabric. He replaced it with a steaming hot cup of tea.

Aziraphale gave him a grateful smile, and clinked their mugs together.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, Aziraphale enjoying the warmth through his gloves, Crowley checking under the leaves of a spider plant on the windowsill in case of any more pests.

Eventually Crowley, satisfied that no interlopers had made it up the wall and in through the bolted window, cleared his throat. “Something on your mind?”

Aziraphale hummed faintly, looking out of the window.

“Only it’s a little early for you, isn’t it? Thought you weren’t getting out of bed before noon, these days.”

Aziraphale seemed to come back to himself. “Oh. Yes. Sorry. I have to go away this evening. I won’t be able to make dinner.”

“Business?”

“I had a missive from Below,” Aziraphale said, shifting uncomfortably. “Urgent task, apparently. I’ve been hand-selected, have to head out to some churchyard in Oxfordshire. Very hush-hush.”

Crowley frowned. “Why all the secrecy? Don’t they normally tell you what you’re going to be doing?”

“I won’t find out until I get there, supposedly,” Aziraphale drummed his fingernails on the surface of the mug. “I can’t think why. Well, I could hazard a guess, but it wouldn’t be a positive one.”

Crowley reached over and put a hand on Aziraphale’s to stop the noise. “‘Zira, if they’d rumbled us, we’d know about it. There wouldn’t be a _conference_ about it.”

Aziraphale just stared down at his cup.

Crowley pulled his hand away with a quick cough. “Besides, I haven’t had a summons. If it was something like that, we’d both be called in, surely.”

Aziraphale nodded morosely.

“Want me to come with you?” Crowley said as lightly as he could muster.

“Oh. What?” Aziraphale blinked. “No, I mean, I think that’s almost certainly a bad idea. It’s going to be Hastur, and probably Ligur - they’d sense you coming from a mile away.”

Crowley shrugged. “I could just get off a station or two early, wait for you - come to the rescue if you don’t come back within a certain amount of…” He trailed off, noticing Aziraphale’s shifty look. “Oh, ‘Zira. _Please_ tell me you’re not thinking of driving there.”

Aziraphale had given all of public transport up as a bad job in the early 1950s, after a train to Doncaster had been delayed by signalling problems and he’d missed a vitally important temptation on Kenneth Williams. (Crowley claimed that private vehicle ownership was bad for society, not to mention a source of pollution, and had stuck with buses, trains, and the London Underground. The real reason was that the few times he’d gotten behind the wheel had brought out a level of rage he hadn’t experienced since the 1940s, and he was worried he could get used to it.)

Money was no object, as Crowley often liked to remind him, and he could have chosen any car in the world. A Mazerati. A Bentley. Even a Volvo would have been better than the car he ended up purchasing. But Aziraphale had popped down to a car dealership in Romford with a stack of newly-miracled pound notes, and asked the salesman to recommend his _nicest_ car. He’d ended up purchasing a 1952 Volkswagen Beetle.

It had started out a rather charming sea-green colour (which Aziraphale had insisted on describing as ‘spiffy’), but either because he’d been sold a dud, or because of Aziraphale’s influence, the paint had started peeling like a bad sunburn almost immediately. The metal underneath became pitted and dull, and it had the look of a forgotten toy that a child had left out in the rain for thirty years.

And that was without getting into the design flaws. The engine was in the boot, for some bloody reason, and had a tendency to cook the inside of the car starting with the back seat (not necessarily a design flaw for demons, but certainly for the angels who might accompany them from time to time). The windows at the back were cut in half in case you wanted to swing them out and scare a cyclist to death. The screen wash, for some reason, was powered by air from the spare tyre under the bonnet. It didn’t even have a petrol gauge. (“Well, it doesn’t really _need_ petrol,” Aziraphale had said defensively, when Crowley had pointed this one out.)

All of this wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in the world if it wasn’t for Aziraphale’s driving. It wasn’t that it was fast - the Bug _couldn’t_ be fast as it only had a top speed of 62 miles an hour. But Aziraphale insisted on driving it ten miles below _that_ on the motorway anyway, puttering along in the right-hand lane, humming happily to himself while motorists sped past him, leaning furiously on their horns. It was probably the most evil thing that Aziraphale did on a regular basis. (“You can’t drive ten miles an hour in central London!” Crowley had told him once, hands vice-tight on the dashboard. “Why on earth not?” asked Aziraphale, barely audible over the cacophony of abuse.)

“So you see, there’s really no point you coming with me,” Aziraphale said finally. “Firstly because you wouldn’t enjoy it, and then _I_ wouldn’t enjoy it because of all your - commentary.”

Crowley groaned.

“And secondly, it’s just far too risky, my dear. They could spot you, they could sense you, they could - I don’t know - check my car for angelic residue.”

“Residue? I’m not a snail,” Crowley said with a huff.

“I do appreciate the offer, though.” Aziraphale reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a pair of mustard-coloured leather gloves. “Besides, I’m rather excited to give _these_ a go.”

Crowley put his head in his hands. “What’s _wrong_ with you,” he said through his fingers. “Aren’t you supposed to be a man of wealth and taste?”

Aziraphale bristled. “Please. You know I can’t stand that song. And anyway, no-one has _ever_ guessed my name.” He sighed. “I could give them the first three syllables and they still wouldn’t stand a chance.”

*******

_Tadfield, 2008 AD_

There was a palpable feeling of evil surrounding the basket on the seat next to Aziraphale, a greasy tang to the air. He’d wanted to put it in the back seat (it couldn’t be hotter than Below) but he’d never gotten around to repairing the seatbelts, and it felt wrong to let the Eater of Worlds slide around like a box of biscuits. If nothing else, it could wake up, and Aziraphale absolutely, desperately did _not_ want that.

He was driving with his foot flat to the floor, frantically humming old Satanic hymns under his breath in the hopes of keeping the thing asleep, still about thirty miles from the Chattering Order of St Beryl. He’d taken a number of detours through tiny Oxfordshire villages looking for an unvandalised phone box so that he could call Crowley. He needed to let Crowley know what was coming. Crowley would know what to do.

The angel had always told him to get a mobile phone, but he’d hated the idea that someone could just get in touch with him whenever they wanted (it was bad enough from Hell) - and anyway, the only person he would ever need to call would be Crowley, who he spent about ninety percent of his life with anyway, so what was the point?

 _This is the point, you nitwit_ , he chastised himself as he rounded another blind bend at a frankly alarming 55 miles an hour. Perhaps he’d get lucky and they’d both be smashed to smithereens by a tractor coming the other way, and he wouldn’t have to bother.

After another half hour he realised he’d have to give it up as a bad job, or risk getting a message through from Hastur asking where he’d gotten to. He pulled into a parking space outside the hospital next to a couple who seemed to be just leaving. Getting out of the car, Aziraphale saw with some horror that the man was strapping a tiny baby into a car seat. But there didn’t seem to be any Secret Service agents, no diplomatic plates or those tiny little American flags they attached to their bonnets for some reason.

“Excuse me, I’m _so_ sorry to bother you,” he said to them. The woman regarded him with tired but happy eyes from the passenger seat. “I say, you’re not American, are you?”

The man gave him a sympathetic look, as someone who had encountered Americans before. “No worries on that score, we’re Tadfield born and bred,” he said cheerfully. “Just heading home as a matter of fact.”

Aziraphale let out a sigh of relief. For one horrible moment he’d thought he’d have to distract them and swap the babies out himself. “Thank goodness.”

The man - Mr Young, he introduced himself - nodded in the direction of the hospital. “Visiting someone, are you?”

“Um...sort of?”

“Well, between you and me, they don’t let you hang about in there.” Mr Young nodded to the sleeping baby in the back of the car. “Just gave him a once over with a wet wipe and turfed us out. The literature implied we’d be kept in overnight.”

Aziraphale swallowed. This poor couple must have come in as an emergency delivery. They’d been perilously close to getting swept up in the whole terrible mess. “Oh well, that’s probably just how nuns do these things. Cleanliness is next to,” he glanced upwards, “well, you know.” He gave the man a fairly weak smile and bid him a good night.

After handing over the basket to one of the nuns, and agreeing that, yes, his toesie-wosies really were _awfully_ sweet, he got back into his car to wait for the convoy to depart. It had felt too dangerous to telephone Crowley from the hospital - the nun had known his _name_ , for good- for someone’s sake. 

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. If he couldn’t call Crowley, then the next best thing would be to gather as much information as possible so that the two of them could come up with a plan later. He would follow the Americans home to their condo (Aziraphale had picked up some American slang from television but didn’t always have the best grasp of what it meant) and then report back to Crowley as soon as he could get back to London. He almost regretted tempting Crowley into regular sleep now - he’d be such a _trial_ when Aziraphale would have to wake him up in a few hours. Still, Armageddon probably trumped those concerns.

Unfortunately, as the angel was always reminding him, the Beetle was hardly inconspicuous. (In fact, the last time he’d spent the night on Crowley’s sofa, the council had marked it as abandoned and towed it away from in front of the shop by morning.) That left only one course of action - his least favourite - but it seemed to be unavoidable at this point.

He’d have to follow them incognito.

Transforming into a moth was something that he tried to do only as a very last resort. Firstly he felt it was somewhat demeaning - it wasn’t as if you found Beelzebub buzzing around her office every other week. It also took a lot of energy, left him craving sugar water and sunshine for days. Most worryingly of all, sometimes while in his insect form he didn’t have quite as firm a grip on his self-control as he did usually, and once or twice he’d been known to - Crowley could _never_ find out - to snack on his own discarded clothing.

Aziraphale took off his jumper and locked it in the glove compartment. After a moment’s thought he stuffed his shirt in there too, it being one of his more intact ones. _Well_ , he thought, _now you’re just a half-naked person sitting in a car outside a maternity hospital. Well done there._

He placed both hands on his temples and concentrated very hard on being small and inconspicuous, a form that would allow him to sneak past all of the frankly terrifying men with guns and sunglasses, and cling to the side of a car seat or travel blanket. He felt the sick, throbbing feeling in his skin that signalled the transition, his human vessel shrinking and reducing, his wings manifesting and then flattening, thinning out to become the sheerest whisper of membrane.

It took him several minutes as a moth to realise he hadn’t opened the window, and would have to go through the whole bloody process again.

*******

_Richmond, 2008_

Crowley watched the estate through some hastily miracled binoculars. Secret Service agents roamed around the grounds at intervals, dressed in black suits and touching their ears a lot for some reason. He knew what Aziraphale had meant about the oppressive feeling around the Antichrist - he was uncomfortably itchy under his shoulder blades, as if his wings were struggling not to jump out and envelop them both.

“I still think this is a terrible idea,” Aziraphale fretted next to him, curls poking out from under his grey knit cap. He’d worked his way through both of his gloves, now just a small puddle of wool in the footwell, and had started on a hole in the arm of his jumper. Occasionally he took a long drink from a bottle of clear, sweet liquid in his lap.

“Well,” Crowley drawled, “it is the only plan we have, so.” He let the binoculars fall back around his neck. “It’s not as if you can hang about with averting the end of the world.”

“But are you _sure_?”

“That it’ll work?”

“That it’s the right thing to do.”

Crowley shifted in his seat, trying to rub his back against the cracked leather of his seat. “It’s the spawn of Satan versus the lives of every man, woman and child on the planet. It’s not even a question. In fact, if you think about it, all I’ll be doing is sending it back home.” He reached for the door handle and started to get out.

“No, wait-” Aziraphale suddenly grabbed his upper arm, pulling him back into the car.

Crowley looked at him over his shoulder, one foot already on the gravel.

“I know we said - we have to do something,” Aziraphale said in a rush. “But killing a _baby-_ ”

“I told you, it’s not a baby, it's just a vessel like yours or mine.” _Well, more yours than mine_ , he couldn’t help thinking. “It’s just a manifestation of chaotic forces. And every day we don’t do something, it will get stronger and stronger, until we won’t be able to do _anything._ ”

“But does it have to be you?” Aziraphale said with a desperate expression.

“Well, you can’t do it, how could a demon kill the Antichrist-”

“But another angel, perhaps? If you just checked, called Above, and spoke to someone-”

Crowley put a hand over Aziraphale’s, feeling his ice-cold skin against his palm. He rubbed his thumb over his knuckles, the skin underneath cracked like soft wings. “It’s alright, ‘Zira. I know you have doubts.” He gently pried the demon’s fingers away from his suit jacket. “But I’m certain.”

He got out of the car smoothly, leaving the binoculars behind. A snap of his fingers changed his working clothes to a black suit, a plastic cord spiralling out of his collar and into his ear, his gardening boots darkened to something rather more polished. The sunglasses, happily enough, stayed the same.

He heard the car door close gently, and Aziraphale’s sudden intake of breath behind him. “Oh, _Crowley…_ ”

He turned on his heel, hands in his pockets, aiming for nonchalance. “Now, don’t make a big fuss about this. It’s just to blend in.”

Aziraphale had one hand pressed to his mouth, eyes wide and scared. “You’ve never worn black before. I’ve _never_ seen you in black. I think - oh, hell - I think it might become you.”

“Come on, everything suits me,” Crowley attempted with a smile. 

Aziraphale just shook his head, not able to make eye contact.

Crowley smiled. “It’s just for a moment, I swear. In, out, do the job, home by teatime. Okay? I pushed our reservation to tonight, even, we can swing by on the way back. How’s that for easy?”

Aziraphale took a step forward. “Look, I...before you go-”

“Aziraphale-”

“Just quickly, I - I was thinking,” he began pulling at the hole in his jumper again. “Did I ever tell you about my Fall?”

“I know the story,” Crowley said, not unsympathetically.

Aziraphale nodded, eyes far away. “Well, it’s just - I’m sure everybody must feel like this, when they’re - um, disobeying, but - but when I gave my sword away, I absolutely thought I was doing the right thing. It didn’t even _occur_ to me that I might not be. How can charity and compassion be wrong?”

Crowley looked upwards briefly. Blasphemy out in the open made him feel jumpy. “It was your sword, Aziraphale. It was a holy weapon.”

Aziraphale smiled faintly. “Yes, of course. Only _I’d_ never used it, you see, never even needed it. It seemed like the easiest thing in the world to give it away, where it would do the most good. That _I_ was good.”

Crowley sighed, looking back in the direction of the house. _We don’t have time for this._ “You know it wasn’t, though. You disobeyed a divine instruction.”

Aziraphale took a step forward, hand outstretched. “Yes, but - that’s what I mean. It’s not as if they’ve ordered you to do this, we don’t know for sure that it’s the right thing to do. You could call Gabriel, you could just _check-_ ”

“We both know that our sides don’t always have the best wishes of humanity at heart,” Crowley said impatiently. “They’ll just - dither over this, maybe even let it happen. They could _want_ it to happen.” He reached out, took hold of Aziraphale’s hand again, the skin cool as clear water. “I know this isn’t your forte, but it’s okay. If you can’t trust your impulses, trust _mine_. Yes?” He squeezed Aziraphale’s fingers and let go, turned around to leave.

“I remember that feeling,” Aziraphale said softly behind him.

Crowley turned, walking backwards towards the gate, his hands in his pockets. “Get back in the car. I’m taking care of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by my failing attempts to grow tomatoes in the British summer. Slugs are our true enemies.
> 
> It looks like this fic will be two more chapters, which I hope to bring you very soon. Thank you again for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! So sorry it's taken so very long to get this update out - as is often the way of these things, I rewrote this chapter no less than four times before eventually hitting on one that I'm happy with. I hope to have the final chapter up before the end of the week (famous last words!)
> 
> I'm also incredibly honoured to link to the first piece of fanart I've ever received, by the incredible @theeyjayy: https://twitter.com/theeyjayy/status/1149464491307884544 !!! beautiful soft moth boy!

_London, 2008 AD_

Crowley sat slumped on the stool, his arms folded on the kitchen island, shoulders down, sunglasses forgotten beside him.

Aziraphale handed him a mug of tea. “Hot and strong, good for shock, my dear,” he said as cheerfully as he could.

“You’re thinking of brandy,” Crowley muttered.

“Oh, well, as you wish.” He snapped his fingers and the tea obligingly shifted its atoms around to become a rather nice turn of the century Armagnac that Crowley kept for special occasions. The mugs, disappointingly, were still chipped.

Crowley didn’t say anything, picking one up and taking a couple of alarmingly large gulps, seemingly without tasting it. He held the handle with only his finger and thumb, the contents dangerously close to slopping all over the counter, as he resumed staring into the middle distance.

Aziraphale bit his lip. This wasn’t exactly his forte. A demon wasn’t often called upon to be comforting, and he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start. “Well, um - here’s to averting Armageddon!” He held his mug out close to Crowley for him to clink.

Crowley finally focused on him, his eyes somewhat shellshocked.

“Well. Perhaps not.” He put his mug back down.

“There’s no chance we made a mistake, is there?” Crowley said hoarsely.

“What sort of mistake?”

“Oh, I don’t know…” he sighed. “Wrong kid?”

“Absolutely not!” Aziraphale said with a start. “I told you, I was with them all the way from the hospital, even up into the house. There’s no possibility of a mistake.”

Crowley just grunted.

“And anyway, I felt it. Every demon within a hundred miles will have felt it, I should think, though,” he took a sip of brandy, “I suppose that only means me.”

Crowley nodded. “I suppose I was just expecting something more...obvious. Red eyes. Hooves.”

“I didn’t really see him that closely.”

“It _,”_ Crowley said tightly. “You didn’t see _it._ ” A sort of shiver passed through his body, his brows drawn low and lips thin.

The problem was, Aziraphale thought, that the more you questioned Crowley, the more stubborn he got. Sometimes he felt it was his fault by being his friend - it was easy for Crowley to look at him as everything an angel shouldn’t be, and so when Aziraphale was nervous, or unsure, that just seemed to make him even more intransigent. No time for doubts. And now here they were, Crowley for the first time in six thousand years looking small and tired, shadows under his eyes from the lamplight, his skin pale and stretched thin. The radiance in his golden eyes seemed to have faded entirely.

“Could I ask you a favour?” Crowley said, startling him out of his line of thinking. He hoped he hadn’t been staring.

“Anything.”

Crowley screwed his mouth over to one side. “You’ll think it’s ridiculous.”

Aziraphale gave him a fond smile. “My dear-”

“Would you check my wings? To see if they’ve - changed?”

He put his mug down, put a hand on the counter, just by Crowley’s folded arms. “You haven’t Fallen. Believe me, it’s not something you can be unsure of.”

Crowley managed a wan smile. “I told you you’d think it was ridiculous.” He pushed away from the counter and got to his feet, pacing. “I just, I don’t know. I keep thinking, what if there’s one grey feather there, somewhere? What if that’s how it’s going to start?”

“Trust me, it won’t,” Aziraphale said. “You Fall, Crowley, you hurtle through space at a million miles an hour. You don’t just - saunter downwards.”

“I know. It’s fine.” Crowley ran a hand through his red hair, pulling it free from its tie, and tugged it viciously, once, twice, red strands peeping from between his white knuckles.

Aziraphale bit his lip. “Please, my dear - sit down, I’m sorry. Of course I’ll check. It’s no problem at all.”

Crowley let out a sigh of relief, letting his hair fall from his hands. He turned around and began slipping his braces off his shoulders.

Aziraphale froze. Angels and demons could manifest their wings at will, and clothing was no impediment to it - it wouldn’t be much use, after all, if every time one wanted to fly, one had to destroy a perfectly good jacket.

“I just want to be sure,” Crowley said, slipping his shirt off his shoulders and folding it neatly on the stool beside him. “All the way down to the joints. Is that alright?”

“Of course,” said Aziraphale lightly, because why shouldn’t it be? The roiling, unsteady feeling in his gut was just some meaningless reaction from his human vessel - probably anxiety about the future consequences of their little act of rebellion.

He looked down at his own hands, the new gloves he’d slipped on for the drive home, one thread already threatening to break loose. He pulled them off, then bolted for the sink, seeing dirt under his fingernails and in the cracks of his palms.

“Really, you don’t have to do that,” Crowley said behind him. “It’s fine.” 

Drying his hands on a tea towel, Aziraphale felt heard the sudden rush of displaced air as Crowley manifested his wings. He turned to see Crowley framed by bright, pristine feathers.

“Oh my,” he breathed.

Crowley’s eyes were still haunted. “Anything obviously out of place?”

They were white, shining white, almost hard to look at even in the dim light of the kitchen. Aziraphale moved to stand behind him, took in his full wingspan, the rows upon rows of pure, soft feathers. “It all looks fine from here.”

“A _proper_ look, please.” Crowley sat up straighter, braced his hands against the edge of the kitchen island. “I need to be sure.”

Aziraphale pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, and reached out with his right hand to check the joint where Crowley’s wing met his shoulderblade. He brushed his index finger against it lightly, and Crowley gasped, sat up in shock.

“Oh - oh _fuck_ !” Aziraphale looked at his hands in horror. “Of course, the cold - my dear, I simply didn’t think.” The warm water from the tap hadn’t made a difference, as usual. “Perhaps if I soaked them in _boiling_ water, I-”

“Good grief, ‘Zira, take a breath,” Crowley turned from the waist and put an arm out to stop him from heading to the kettle. “The temperature’s fine. It’s - soothing, if anything. It’s just been a while, that’s all. I forgot how sensitive they can be.”

Aziraphale tangled his shaking hands together and focused on his breathing. The warmth of Crowley’s bare arm against his jumper, the whispered sound of feathers brushing against the marble worktop.

Crowley let go of him, turning back around and bending forward slightly. “Alright. Let’s go again, come on.”

Aziraphale took a breath, resumed his position standing just behind him. “I’m going to touch you now,” he said in a rush, reaching out and taking a tentative hold of the joint of Crowley’s left wing. He heard the angel take a long, slow breath in and out, but there was no yelping this time.

He continued his way along the wing, brushing his fingers gently from stem to tip, and seeing only pure, white feathers. He combed through Crowley’s secondary feathers and out to the primaries. His wings were soft but sturdy, no broken stems, the quills easily springing back as he released them one by one. There was a familiar scent there, too, something green and bright, perhaps from his garden.

Little by little Crowley bent lower over the marble, almost as if he didn’t realise he was doing it, the tension in his arms and shoulders starting to dissipate as Aziraphale gently brushed through to the very tips of his wings. 

He gave a little jump when Aziraphale cleared his throat.

“Um, sorry, it’s just a little difficult to see everything here at the edges. I don’t suppose you could open them up a little?”

Crowley rolled his shoulders easily, the muscles in his back working perfectly in tandem, spreading his wings up and out. They flexed to their full width until they were almost brushing the kitchen walls, so that Aziraphale could run his fingers in between each and every feather.

“How’s that?”

 _Perfect,_ Aziraphale opened his mouth to say. And then, “Perfectly adequate, thank you.”

There was no gradation in the colour of Crowley’s wings, every feather was identical to the next, save for some differences in length. Each one carved from pure ivory, but made of the softest silk. Aziraphale touched them as little as possible, using the back of his hands, the edges of his fingers. Almost unconsciously, he began to emulate Crowley’s long, slow breaths.

As he moved to Crowley’s other wing he saw goosebumps on the back of his neck. “Are you cold, my dear?”

“Quite the opposite, actually.”

Aziraphale swallowed past a dry tongue. “Probably the brandy.”

Crowley gave a soft hum, and bowed his head again.

By the time Aziraphale had made it through to the last feather on the right-hand side, Crowley had pillowed his head against his folded arms. The tips of his wings drooped lazily down to the kitchen floor. As he released the right one, it folded reflexively back into his body and demanifested, leaving just the bowed, unmarked back of a man in his late forties.

Aziraphale stepped gently round the kitchen island and saw that Crowley’s eyes were half-closed, the lids low over eyes that had regained a little of their golden glow. “One hundred percent white, my dear. Pure as the driven snow.”

Crowley opened his eyes slowly, smiling up at him. “Boy, it’s been a long time. I forgot how good that could feel.” He was slurring his words a little bit, face warm and pink. There was a red line across his chest from the edge of the counter, fading slowly, stark against the rest of his unmarked skin.

Aziraphale managed a small smile. “Happy to help.”

Crowley pushed himself into a slumped sitting position. “Y’know, it’s traditional, in these cases, to - return the favour. Can I-” He reached out, fingers spread wide in Aziraphale’s direction.

Aziraphale took a swift step back, his hips bumping against the kitchen counter sharply. “Thank you. No need.”

Crowley watched him, blinking slowly, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “You don’t want me to see your wings.”

“I have no feelings on it whatsoever, as a matter of fact,” Aziraphale said to his folded hands.

Crowley was silent for a moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “I’m really sorry, you know. All that stuff I said, back in - during the war. It was the first time I’d ever seen them, and - ‘Zira, I think about it all the time. What I said, it was unforgivable.”

“It’s fine, really. I forgive you.” The words felt thick on his tongue.

“S’not fine.” Crowley sat up straighter, but made no move to redress himself. “You’re always so kind to me, and I just-”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t think about it,” Aziraphale lied easily.

Crowley studied him, mouth twitching. “Alright. Then would you show them to me again?”

Aziraphale’s fingers clenched on the counter behind him. “Why? You want to see what Fallen wings look like, for comparison?”

Crowley ran a hand through his hair, eyebrows drawn. “No.”

“I’m not - like you,” Aziraphale said tightly.

“I know.”

“I mean,” Aziraphale waved a hand in Crowley’s direction, his torso lean and defined, the light pouring from his eyes, his skin. “I’m not - neat.”

“I _know,_ ” Crowley said with a laugh. “I’ve been in your car.”

“Just listen,” Aziraphale said, enunciating carefully, consonants bitten off. “I am not particularly pleased by my appearance. It does not give me joy to be looked at by others, especially my - my wings. Can you understand that?” He kept his eyes fixed on the edge of the kitchen island in front of him, the patterns of the marble where they had been sliced short at the quarry.

“Why not?”

Aziraphale blinked. He looked up, and saw genuine bewilderment on Crowley’s face. “What do you mean, ‘why not?’ For goodness’ sake, you’re the one having a crisis of faith over a single - potential - grey feather. How do you think it feels to have them _all_?”

Crowley twisted his mouth to one side. “But that’s - ‘Zira, it’s not about how they look, it’s about - what it could mean.” He got to his feet, one hand out as if to apologise. “I know I said - all that stupid, thoughtless shit - but I thought your wings looked-”

Aziraphale closed his eyes in anticipation of the blow. _Ashen. Grimy._

“Soft.”

He frowned, squinted through his lashes suspiciously. Crowley wasn’t making fun of him, at least as far as he could tell. “Soft?”

Crowley shrugged. “Aren’t they?”

 _Sickeningly soft, really. Like a torn edge - ripped paper, shredded fabric._ He bit his tongue.

“You don’t have to say yes. I want you to know that you can say no. You can always tell me ‘no’, and it’s end of discussion, I swear.” Crowley took a gentle step forward, around the kitchen island, and Aziraphale held his ground. “But I’d like to see them again, if you’d let me.”

Aziraphale studied him for a moment. He considered what it could mean to get his hat and coat, walk out into the night, drive away. “Alright.”

He could manifest his wings through his clothing, but Crowley was still standing in his trousers and socks. It felt like the time to reveal himself, show his true form, so that Crowley could react how he knew he would - disgust, pity, sadness - and then they could both just get on with the rest of their lives.

He pulled off two jumpers at once, struggling to get his head free, and tossing them on the floor despite Crowley’s brief tongue click of disapproval. He could miracle the shirt away but it felt more comfortable to undo it by hand, as if each button was an individual choice, no action connected to any other.

Aziraphale held his shirt closed with only his hands, looking down at himself. “I should warn you - we don’t look quite the same.” He looked up.

Crowley was standing with his back to the refrigerator, hands clasped behind him, sharp elbows out to the sides. His expression was unreadable. 

“I mean - well, you’re an angel. You know that. You’re perfect. I’m - not.”

Crowley frowned. “You know I’m not perfect.”

“I meant externally,” Aziraphale said wearily.

Crowley grinned suddenly. “I see. Well, you look pretty good to me. Externally.”

Aziraphale swallowed, fingers flexing on the thin fabric of his shirt. “Flattery will get you everywhere, I suppose,” he muttered to himself. 

In one motion, he pulled the shirt free from his shoulders and tossed it onto the floor, allowing his wings to unfurl into the physical realm. He shut his eyes tight. “Tell me when you want me to get dressed.”

There was a long period of silence - _bad, bad, bad._ He hoped fervently that no part of him was blushing. Crowley hadn’t blushed when he’d disrobed - but then Crowley had never Fallen. Perhaps shame was reserved solely for those cast out of Eden. He folded his arms reflexively, thinking of Adam and Eve in the Garden, fig leaves clasped to their skin.

He struggled to rein in his imagination, bidding it to show him any picture in the world other than the one that was creeping into his mind’s eye. Crowley’s face, his hand over his mouth, eyes horrified, or shocked, or maybe even clenched with disgust.

And himself - for some reason he was always able to picture his own sluggish form perfectly as well. The thick fur on his chest, tracking down towards his navel, camouflage patterns smudged in grey and brown, matching the tracery on his wings. Light years from Crowley’s smooth torso. His dry, papery skin, flaking in patterns across his chest and abdomen, making him look like a pilled blanket.

He heard Crowley take two steps forward, heard his careful breathing inches from his face. “Aziraphale. You can open your eyes, if you want.”

“Ah,” he heard his voice on the verge of breaking, and cleared his throat quickly. “It’s fine, thank you. Easier like this.”

“ _Aziraphale_ ,” Crowley said sadly, but stopped. “Alright.” He felt him step to his right, looking past his arm at his hunched wings. 

Aziraphale dipped his shoulder forward to let him see, turned his head away. _Let’s get this whole thing over and done with._  

“What if I tell you what you look like?” Crowley murmured, his head closer to Aziraphale’s ear than he’d noticed, making him jump. “Would that be alright?”

“Must you?”

“I see tall, strong wings, in forest colours.” Crowley cleared his throat, his voice hoarse. “Do you know how many different shades you have?”

“Two,” Aziraphale said tightly. “Brown. Grey.”

“No, no, you’ve got _way_ more than that. I can see black, and red, and - yep, there’s gold, down here,” he heard Crowley’s voice from somewhere closer to his waist, “and - I won’t touch them, unless you say it’s okay - but they look soft, ‘Zira. But I mean, all of you does.” He heard him straighten up, move to stand in front of him, warmth radiating as if Aziraphale were standing before an open oven. “And I like your curls a little longer. I hate that you wear that grubby little hat all the time. Plus I had no idea you had hair on your chest. You’re soft all over!” A little laugh, here. “You’re a creature of the earth, ‘Zira. You’re dressed in nature’s finery.”

Aziraphale’s hands tightened on his own upper arms. He opened his eyes a crack.

Crowley was standing in front of him, hands by his sides, fingers twitching. His eyebrows were up, his mouth fond.

“You - can touch them. My wings. If you want to,” Aziraphale managed.

Crowley reached up and over his right shoulder, ran a single fingertip over the tallest joint.

Aziraphale, jaw clenched, made no sound.

Crowley let out a quick breath. “Softer than feathers. How is that possible?”

“Two weeks in boiling sulfur, I should think,” Aziraphale said through his teeth.

Crowley flinched, drew his hand back.

Aziraphale sighed, looking down at his besocked feet on the kitchen tiles. “I’m glad you like them. I don’t. They’re just - something else I drag around.”

“When did you groom them last?”

Aziraphale gave him a sharp look, but it seemed to be a genuine question. “Do they look that terrible?”

“Nah. Just some loose feathers here and there that would be more comfortable taken out. A few split quills.” He rocked back on his heels, eyes on Aziraphale’s. “It can’t feel great.”

One slow breath, in and out. “It’s been - a while.”

“How long is a while?”

Aziraphale bristled, shoulders up. “I suppose you give yourself a full check-up every week? Full-length mirror, special comb?”

“It’s just a regular comb,” Crowley said mildly. “Aren’t you the one that’s always about pleasures of the flesh?”

“I don’t - like it. I don’t like doing it.” He struggled to stand upright. “You know how things get when I touch them,” he muttered eventually.

“What if I did it?” Crowley took a step back, put his hands in his pockets. “Tit for tat?” His tone was light, his smile almost sweet, but there was a forced stillness to his body language.

Aziraphale felt himself weaken. “Alright,” he replied eventually. “Shall I sit down?”

Crowley took a moment, looking back at him. Then he nodded towards the stool. “Not to criticise your technique, doctor, but it actually wasn’t _that_ comfortable. I wouldn’t recommend using a slab of marble as a pillow.”

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. “I seem to remember in my prelapsarian days that it was traditional to be groomed lying on a bed of sweet smelling clover.”

Crowley hummed, tipped his head back and forth. “I was thinking the bed would be more comfortable. That is, if you are.” He cleared his throat. “Comfortable.”

Aziraphale pried his fingers loose from his upper arms, laced them together in front of him in what he hoped was a relaxed looking way. He nodded. “Lead the way, my dear.”

He had been in Crowley’s bedroom many times - as one of the only people who entered the angel’s flat, he was forever having to give his opinion on some decor change, curtains, rug, and so forth. Just the night before he had woken him up with news of Armageddon, Crowley’s face briefly bleary with sleep, his hair still stuck to his cheek, before he’d (literally) snapped himself out of it.

But entering it with the intention to use it - even if only to lie down - made him see it with a different eye. The linen sheets in dove grey had seemed so fussy, needing the wrinkles constantly miracled out of them, but as he ran a hand over them he could tell how soft they were. The lamps on either side of the ridiculously wide bed cast a soft pool of light as Crowley turned them on, his fingers pink against the bulbs.

Aziraphale sat down on the very edge of the bed, hands braced on his knees to stop himself from twisting them together.

He felt rather than saw Crowley crawl onto the bed behind him, the mattress dipping a little, a feeling of unsteadiness. 

“Is this alright?” he said behind Aziraphale, his knees barely brushing Aziraphale’s hips.

“Yes, fine.”

There was a pause.

“Your wings are pretty - uh - compact.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, do you think you could try opening them a little?”

Aziraphale concentrated. Too long, far too long since he’d manifested his wings, let alone tried to move them. One could always feel them, of course, even when they were concealed in aether, but he thought of them more like something crammed into a disused cupboard, the door bolted shut. Out of sight, out of mind.

He tried to stretch, and yelped.

“Whoa, hey, I didn’t touch you,” Crowley said, hands up in the air.

“They - hurt.” Aziraphale strained again, and was hit with another stab of pain under his shoulderblade. “Why do they hurt?

“Er, well - they’re pretty - hunched up,” Crowley said slowly. “How long since you groomed them last? You didn’t say.”

Aziraphale bit the inside of his cheek.

“Months? Years? ‘Zira, come on - this is basic stuff. You need to get your wings checked regularly, just like anything else.”

“I know,” he snapped. “You might remember I wasn’t always the best at following orders.”

He felt Crowley exhale heavily, warm breath over his shoulders. “Have you groomed them since the war?”

Aziraphale hunched his shoulders. “That’s - that has nothing to do with it.”

“Sure it doesn’t.” Crowley braced one hot palm across his spine, spreading his fingers and digging the tips of his fingers carefully into Aziraphale’s springcoiled muscles.

Aziraphale hissed again. “That feels - particularly unpleasant.”

“‘Zira. Have you _seen_ your wings since back then?”

“I can’t recall.” Aziraphale tried to sit up a little straighter, pull his spine in and shoulders back, but with Crowley’s hand on his back he was more aware of the pain as he tried to force his muscles into place. “I don’t tend to catalogue every time I’m in need of them.”

Crowley hummed thoughtfully. “I’m no healer, but my best guess is you’ve been cramping them up so long, it’s like you’ve had your fists clenched for decades. I can’t even _move_ your wings, let alone groom them.” Crowley placed both palms on Aziraphale’s back and dug his thumbs in just under his shoulderblades.

Aziraphale gasped. “That’s-”

“Yeah. Sixty-five years of tension, if not longer.” Crowley removed his hands, Aziraphale’s skin chilling almost immediately, and got to his feet. He walked into the demon’s field of vision, tipped his head to one side to catch his eye, where Aziraphale was glumly looking at his own joined hands. “What about a massage?”

Aziraphale blinked. “What?”

Crowley’s expression seemed entirely innocent. “Have you had one before?”

Once, in a hammam in Marrakesh, in what had seemed at the time like a little piece of Hell - the thick, moist air roiling up to the high arched ceilings, the dark corners for mischief and temptation. He hadn’t had much of the local language, and after a very perplexing and one-sided conversation, he had found himself bustled through an open door and in front of a slim, naked man. Apparently it wasn’t quite the done thing to wear all one’s clothes in a steam bath, and the man had carefully, kindly, stripped him down to nothing before lying him gently face down on a long table. Aziraphale had found himself being rubbed down purely because he hadn’t wanted to cause a fuss. But there was no denying that it had been a fairly pleasurable experience, if tinged with a kind of manic fear in case his wings sprang into existence and wallopped the masseur in the face.

“Yes,” he said eventually.

Crowley raised an eyebrow, clearly not the response he had expected. “Well, what do you think? I reckon if we can unkink some of whatever’s happening back there, it’s all connected, right?”

Aziraphale gave a terse nod.

Crowley left the room, returning with a stoppered glass bottle filled with a light green liquid. “Oil,” he said simply, pulling over a low table to rest the bottle on, and pouring a little into his cupped palm.

“From the kitchen?”

“From the bathroom, you great buffoon. You put it in the bath, rub it into your skin, whatever.” There was an unpleasant squelching sound as Crowley rubbed the oil into his palms behind him. He rested his fingertips lightly on Aziraphale’s shoulders, either side of his neck. “Okay?”

Aziraphale nodded.

Crowley started slowly, pressing his palms down over his back in long, slow stripes, stopping occasionally to pour out more oil. It smelled familiar somehow, a peppery, green scent. It made him think of long, slow cooking in a little Italian kitchen, focaccia thick with crystals of salt as big as diamonds.

“Rosemary,” Crowley said curtly when questioned. “From the garden.”

 _For remembrance,_ Aziraphale thought vaguely, letting his head tip forward as Crowley applied pressure to the back of his neck. He let out a small grunt of pain as the angel started to knead his vertebrae one by one, working down his spine.

“Do you remember the last time you did this?” Crowley said in a low voice, perhaps trying to take his mind off it.

“Oh, I don’t know. I think people were still wearing hats.”

Crowley snorted. “I meant with someone else. Unless, that’s what you-”

“Oh.” Aziraphale looked down at the lines on his corduroy trousers, the soft grey linen between his thighs. “I’m afraid it’s been a very, very long time.”

“Centuries?”

“Eden.”

He heard Crowley’s intake of breath, barely a gasp, more a whisper. “That long? Aziraphale…”

Aziraphale started to shrug, and Crowley’s hands came up suddenly to bracket his shoulders, stilling the motion. The warmth of them on his upper arms, his fingertips, the ends of his nails just visible if he twisted his head to the side a fraction, made Aziraphale shiver.

Crowley returned his hands to Aziraphale’s spine, tracing what felt like tree branches, up from the base of his spine to the sides, fingers splayed, then again, but higher up, towards his shoulderblades. Like a plant breaking through the surface and reaching for the sun. Aziraphale let his eyes drift closed to focus on the sensation, the heady scent enveloping him, green and bright.

“Demons don’t groom?” Crowley said finally, his voice a little rough.

“Oh, I’m sure they do,” Aziraphale murmured. “Not a pastime I’ve ever indulged in, I’m afraid. Knowing my colleagues, I’m not sure it would be a pleasurable experience for me. Sandpaper comes to mind.”

“You’re not serious?” There was a note of horror in Crowley’s voice.

 _Oops,_ Aziraphale thought to himself. “Just hyperbole,” he said quickly. “What about you? I’m sure you’re quite the commodity Above. A Principality can be highly regarded by angels and archangels. I should know.”

Crowley’s hands stilled, his warm palms resting on Aziraphale’s ribs. “You know.”

Aziraphale twisted, looking over his shoulder. He could just see the side of Crowley’s profile against the lamplight behind him, could make out the line of his throat as he swallowed. “That you’re a Principality?”

“That they gave me your title.”

“My dear, I’ve known _that_ since the day we met on Earth. You were on the front line, you had a holy weapon in your hand, I didn’t think it was a secret. I’m sorry if it’s caused you any discomfort.” Aziraphale returned to his former position, hissing a little as he shifted.

Crowley started to move his hands again, swiping his thumbs up either side of Aziraphale’s spine. “I didn’t think - I mean, I know it was your-”

“Please, don’t give it another thought, it doesn’t matter to me at all. It makes a perfect kind of sense, honestly. A role to be filled, and knowing you now, I can’t think of anyone better.”

Crowley cleared his throat. “Well. Thank you.”

“So, _are_ you? In demand, I mean? As I recall, despite the strictures against pride, angels can be rather status obsessed.”

Crowley made a sort of ‘ugh’ noise. “I wouldn’t - I don’t - it’s not like that.” He turned his hands outward, a hard line of pressure smoothing down Aziraphale’s sides. “After the Rebellion, our numbers were literally cut in half. I suppose it was a way to feel less alone. To feel connected to one another.”

“I _was_ there, you know, after the Rebellion,” Aziraphale chided him softly. “And I don’t remember anything like _that_.”

“I thought you said a Principality was always in demand?”

“Oh, yes, but,” Aziraphale lifted one hand to make a dismissive gesture, Crowley’s fingertips moving him back into his relaxed position easily, “I didn’t take advantage of those offers. Those requests were about my title, not myself.”

“What in blazes do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, it’s a sign of respect, isn’t it, to groom another angel’s wings?”

“Can be,” Crowley said petulantly. “Can be a lot of things.”

Aziraphale sighed. “I never wanted to impose on anyone of a lower rank than I was, for fear they’d feel bullied into doing it. And of course, I’d have to turn them down for the same reason, in case they felt they were obligated to ask.”

“You are ridiculous, you know that?” Crowley said with a frown. “It wouldn’t’ve been an imposition. I didn’t know you well, but I know you had - fans.”

Aziraphale shifted uneasily. “I very much doubt it.”

“‘Zira, you’re - you were _sweet_. I remember angels talking about your singing, about your blue eyes. Heaven, I was out in deep space most of the time and I still heard about you. They would have lined up for you without a title.”

There was a moment of silence. Aziraphale felt rather dizzy - the potent scent of rosemary suddenly overpowering, prickling at his eyes. He cleared his throat. “I suppose if you think about it, it doesn’t really make much sense for Her to have imposed an angelic hierarchy at all. I mean we were all created equal, weren’t we? Sprung forth from Her infinite love, and so on? Why on earth She felt that it was important for some of us to be given dominion over others, more power, more responsibility-”

“That’s enough.” Crowley’s voice was soft. “Please.”

Aziraphale blinked. His icy blood was in his cheeks, his pulse was fast. “Sorry,” he murmured.

There was a soft touch at his hip, and for one ludicrous moment he thought it was Crowley’s fingers. He turned his head, looked down, and saw grey feathers brushing his leg. “Oh. They seem to have relaxed a bit.” He shifted his shoulders and found that the tension had mostly passed.

“Can you move them?” Crowley said in a low voice behind him.

Aziraphale shut his eyes tight, concentrating on his wings. He could feel the air currents stirring his feathers, the places where they brushed over Crowley’s crossed legs. Slowly, infinitely slowly, he tried to fan his wings.

“There you go,” Crowley said in a thick voice. “There you are.”

He opened his eyes and could see them to his left and right. Not fully extended, there was a tension, like pulling a rubber band tight, the more he pushed them out, as if they would snap. But there were his wings, curving around his shoulders slightly. They seemed less dreadful than he remembered. Perhaps they were best viewed in dim light.

“They’re, er, pretty dusty,” Crowley said gently. “Need some uncrossing too. But all things considered, they’re in pretty good shape.” He felt Crowley trace a finger over a feather on his left, from the root to the tip. He shivered bodily.

“Shouldn’t you wash your hands?”

“I think the oil will be helpful, actually. Smooth everything down.” Crowley stood up, moved the table aside, picking up the bottle again. “That’s if you don’t mind it. I know it’s a strong scent.”

Aziraphale looked up at him, swinging the bottle by its neck in one hand. “No, I like it. It’s a fine idea.”

Crowley tossed the bottle from hand to hand, the motion making his loose braces hitch around his hips. “Do you want to lie down, then? Might be more comfortable.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, turning to look at the bed. His wings, forgotten for so long, were like swathes of material dragging behind him, getting in the way. He felt terribly heavy all of a sudden. The idea of lying face down was immensely seductive. “And you’ll just…”

“Sit next to you,” Crowley said firmly. “If that’s alright.”

“Yes, yes,” Aziraphale murmured, sweeping his wings back with both hands, and pulling his knees up onto the bed. “More than alright.” A little self-conscious, he crawled up the bed, pulling a dove-soft pillow under his head, feeling his wings part and start to fall either side behind him from the weight.

Crowley crossed to put the oil on his bedside table, settled down next to Aziraphale on the bed, just barely in his periphery. Letting his head drop to the pillow, Aziraphale could see he had one knee flat on the bed, one foot on the floor. _Hays Code_ , he thought somewhat deliriously.

His eyes drifted closed as Crowley started grooming him, beginning with the feathers closest to the joint at his back, fingers running through to separate and smooth them all the way to the tips. The soft, rustling sounds reminded him of waves, the warmth of Crowley’s hands like stepping into the noonday sun. There was a length of leather draped over his hip - probably Crowley’s loose braces - and he could feel the rough denim of his trousers pressed against his ribs as Crowley bent over him, focused on his work.

He shifted a little closer, almost unwillingly, letting the weight of his body and his wings pull him more towards Crowley, drinking the warmth of his body in. Such weakness, such greed, but he couldn’t help himself, as if when Crowley had massaged the tension out of his muscles, he’d worn through Aziraphale’s defences, his ability to keep his pathetic desires in check.

Crowley’s fingers were patient and slow, treating him with a tenderness he absolutely did not deserve. The seductive feeling was similar to when he was drunk - something tight and coiled in his gut slowly releasing and unwinding, a great weight he hadn’t known he’d been carrying starting to dissipate into his bloodstream, carrying warm relief through his veins.

Aziraphale was asleep before Crowley finished his other wing. Deep in a dreamless sleep, he thought he felt the momentary brush of something against his forehead - perhaps one of his moths had followed him here - before he slipped back down into comfortable darkness.

*******

_St James’ Park, 2008 AD_

There was only one bed, so Crowley had slept on the sofa. Whatever awkwardness there could have been in the morning was swiftly forgotten when a slim, ivory envelope was pushed under his door. Aziraphale’s summons followed a few minutes later in the form of a one-legged London pigeon that crashed through a (closed) window and promptly expired from shock. (Crowley waited to revive it until they were on their way to head office, wanting it well away from his raspberry canes.)

Afterwards, Aziraphale was already at their rendezvous as he approached, his back turned, staring out over the duck pond. His knit cap was pulled firmly down over his ears, making his curls stick out at the sides like an overstuffed scarecrow. There was a thick black cloud over his head - for once not metaphorical - from what Crowley could tell was his third or fourth cigarette.

Crowley rested against the fence next to him, arms folded, facing out towards the park. He scanned the crowd for any familiar faces.

Aziraphale took a long, long drag, turning his cigarette to ash all the way down to the filter. “How bad was it?” he said, eyes fixed on the ducks.

Crowley reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the medal Gabriel had bestowed upon him. The thick weight of gold, about as big as his palm, embossed with a spread pair of wings. He let the whole thing dangle from its garish red ribbon, and handed it over to Aziraphale wordlessly.

Aziraphale put the butt of his cigarette in his coat pocket and took the medal, turning it over in his hands. “I don’t understand.” His eyes flicked up to meet Crowley’s briefly. “I suppose I thought, from your reaction yesterday, that your actions were going to be received rather more unfavourably.”

“Just another thing that Heaven and I disagree on,” Crowley said, jaw clenched. He saw the brief flash of worry in Aziraphale’s eyes.

It had been humiliating. Gabriel had invited someone from the _Heavenly Inquirer_ and insisted that they pose for photographs, shaking hands with fixed grins. He’d even removed Crowley’s sunglasses.

Of course, all of this gladhanding was just a sham. Gabriel had let him know that while they were _extremely_ grateful for his initiative and quick thinking in wiping out the spawn of Satan and preventing the end of the world, could he please not do it again? After all, Armageddon was bound to arrive eventually, it was part of Her Great Plan, and although killing the Antichrist in _theory_ was a wonderful idea, in practice all he’d done was kick the whole thing down the road a little bit. Great to have this extra time to plan, said Gabriel, clapping him on the back, but we won’t need it next time.

“Next time,” Crowley had said vaguely.

“Well, you didn’t think the Adversary was just going to give up, do you?” Gabriel had replied with a fairly inappropriate chuckle.

Aziraphale handed him back the medal, and lit another cigarette. “Well, I suppose that’s a relief,” he said through a mouthful of smoke. “I don’t mind telling you I was a little preoccupied, there, in case they - well, I suppose I’m not completely up on what they do to angels who do things they disapprove of - that is to say, other than the _ultimate_ punishment, of course, but I never had any doubts that you’d-”

Crowley weighed the medal in his hand, gripping it tightly enough to bruise, barely listening to Aziraphale’s stream of consciousness. With one swift motion he turned to face the duck pond, and reared backwards like a shot-putter, slinging the whole thing bodily into the middle of the pond.

It made a satisfying ‘splosh’ as it impacted the water, descending swiftly to the depths where no doubt it would inspire a new generation of koi carp to live better, more devout lives.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale sputtered.

Crowley turned back around, grinning. A moment later he reached over and plucked Aziraphale’s cigarette from between his lips, and took his very first puff of nicotine. The cool, daredevil image was somewhat ruined by him coughing it all immediately back up again. “Ugh,” he managed when his throat had stopped aching, “that does _not_ taste how you’d think it’d taste.”

Aziraphale seemed to have been rendered speechless.

Crowley handed him back the cigarette, then when Aziraphale simply looked it at, eyes wide, gently placed it back in the demon’s mouth. His eyes drifted to the bob of Aziraphale’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed around it.

“That was _extremely_ reckless,” Aziraphale managed to say.

“Yeah, well,” Crowley said, cocky grin restored, hands in his pockets. “Speaking of reckless, how much trouble are _you_ in?” He nodded towards the cigarette. “Haven’t seen you smoking since the ban.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “They were rather decent about the whole thing, actually. Beelzebub said they expected something like this might happen. And when I said I thought _you_ were responsible, well, you have something of a reputation for swift and decisive action.”

Crowley grunted.

“They’ve returned the original baby to his American parents, just to tie up any loose ends. And Lord Satan has moved the plan on to ‘Contingency Alpha’.”

“Contingency Alpha?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “No idea, I’m afraid. I rather doubt I’ll be included in any of their infernal plans again.”

Crowley rested a hip against the fence, turning to face him. “I seem to have given _you_ a reputation.”

Aziraphale shrugged, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. “I’m sure you’ve done no more harm than I have already, my dear.”

“So it’s war, then.”

Aziraphale flicked a little ash into the water. “So it would seem. My orders are to stick to you like a fly on jam. Well, she didn’t say - jam,” he said with a sideways glance, “but her meaning was the same. I’m to make sure you don’t interfere with any more of our diabolical plans.” He straightened up, a faint smile on his face. “Should make things rather easier for us to carry on - well, fraternising, I suppose.”

“Not going to be much to fraternise about, ‘Zira.”

“Well, there’s plenty,” Aziraphale continued on blithely, “even if we’re unlikely to have any more - assignments, I mean, we’ll still have our dinners, and our walks in the park, and, I suppose - should you be amenable - _I_ thought that our experiment yesterday was, was rather a success, and I wouldn’t be averse to-”

“But it’s all going to disappear,” Crowley cut him off, lost in thought. “Maybe the Antichrist is already back on Earth, then we’ve got, what, eleven years? And even if not, how long until they try again? We could have twenty years, thirty. That’s _nothing._ ”

Aziraphale seemed to have gone rather pale, even paler than usual. “Well, we only found out about the end of the world two days ago, my dear. It might take rather longer to come up with a plan.”

“Don’t you see? This was it, this was our chance,” Crowley spat. “Now they’re going to do the whole thing again, only this time, you and I won’t have any advance knowledge whatsoever. We won’t be able to do anything to stop it.”

Aziraphale paused. “What if we went looking for him?”

“No point. He’s camouflaged. Won’t be able to find him unless we’re about twenty feet away, and he could be anywhere in the world.” Crowley ran a hand over his hair, tucking a stray piece behind his ear viciously. “Probably America, that’s where I’d put the little bastard. Perfect breeding ground for a young Father of Lies.”

Aziraphale was silent, shoulders hunched, eyes on the floor.

Crowley took a look around the park. All of it would be gone, all these people, all the animals, the _plants_. No more sorting through old vinyl in Brick Lane. No more spun sugar desserts at the Savoy. No more anything.

“Let’s go off together,” he said all in a rush, the thought occurring to him like a bolt from the heavens.

“What?” Aziraphale said, two spots of red high on his cheeks.

“When was the last time you were in Japan?” Crowley said desperately. “You haven’t even seen it since the Industrial Revolution, have you?”

“Well, I suppose-”

“Or Australia, have you ever been to Australia? You’d bloody love it there, it’s hotter than any human can stand for long. Or even - we could go to _Wales_. I’ve never been to Wales. Why not? What’s stopping us?”

Aziraphale extinguished his cigarette with a pinch. “Your shop?” he said shakily.

“Get someone to watch it,” he said dismissively. “Easy. Could even come back myself every now and then, make sure it’s all okay. No big deal.”

“What would,” Aziraphale gave the sky a brief, significant look, “your superiors think?”

“Well,” Crowley said, drawing out the syllable, “I mean, it’s not like I’ve ever been _ordered_ to stay in London, not actually _told_ to. I mean I just stayed here because, I mean, force of habit, right? All my stuff’s here. But I can go wherever I want.” He gave Aziraphale a gentle push in the shoulder. “And you have to come with me, right? Ordered to. Got to do it.”

“Crowley-”

“And then - like you said - maybe we’ll sniff out the Antichrist somewhere. Stranger things have happened.” He gestured at the park. “I mean, they won’t try England again, will they? So we up our odds just by skipping town.”

Aziraphale sighed. “You want to do a farewell tour of Earth.”

Crowley gritted his teeth. “What else are we going to do, eh?” He found himself gripping Aziraphale’s shoulder, worried he might hurt him even through the many, many layers of fabric he was wearing. “What are _you_ going to do? Sleep through the next twenty years?”

Aziraphale blanched. “Well, I - I hadn’t-”

“I mean, this is _it_ , Aziraphale. There’s a bloody time limit now.” He lowered his sunglasses, looking him in the eyes. “We can’t piss about any more, if there’s anything we want to see, or do, we have to do it _now_ , because soon there won’t be anything left. Do you understand?”

Aziraphale was close, he realised suddenly. Crowley had pulled him in by his shoulder, a scant three or four inches between them, his sunglasses halfway down his nose. The demon’s cloudless eyes were fixed on his with an unreadable expression - fear? Shock? He saw Aziraphale frown, bite his lip, and then-

And then suddenly he lurched forward and pressed a clumsy, far too forceful kiss to his lips.

His mouth was cold, his lips chapped, and Crowley - eyes stretched wide with surprise - could see that Aziraphale’s face was screwed up in what looked like pain, or desperation.

And then he pulled back, mouth open slightly. “Oh dear,” he mumbled, and put a hand over his mouth. “I think I got rather carried away.”

Crowley swallowed, mouth dry.

Aziraphale put a hand to his throat, and Crowley could see his pulse skipping underneath his grey fingers. “Perhaps we could-”

Crowley held up a hand. “Don’t. Don’t say anything.” He took hold of the demon by the ridiculous puffed sleeve of his enormous jacket and began pulling him in the direction of the parked Beetle. “I don’t want to waste any more time.”


End file.
